Lazy moochers

Please use gender neutral inclusive language, instead of landlord, use the gender neutral term, landleech.

I was ready to hate on this post... but you right.
Seconding this motion

How do people still argue that landlords are useful and necessary?

By being landlords or personally knowing landlords.
- I swear my uncle is a good landlord. Keeps prices low, I swear he doesn't rip off his renters. He would never do that.
  If there were as many good landlords as I have heard this story we wouldn't have any problems Kyle, sit the fuck back down.
The people saying that are usually hoping to become landlords themselves.
My parents own multiple rental properties and completely straight face told me it's a charity cause they rent to people who can't afford homes.
Meanwhile I'm engaging with my mutual aid group every week handing out about 400 meals, and survival gear for people who can't afford anything.
Glad their fucking charity has turned enough profit to pay off the rentals, their main home, and their vacation spot though. /s
- If they're making profit, how in the world can they possibly think it's charity?
I just found an article (from 1955) by my grandma where she argued that she prefers renting over building a house because she has more freedom that way. She can move more easily because she doesn't have to find a buyer for her house, she doesn't have to worry about something breaking because that's on the landlord to fix and she doesn't have to go into debt to live somewhere.
As far as I know she never owned a home, always rented. But all her kids bought houses.
- Sure, but it sounds like she’s never been evicted for no reason.
- I had a coworker liked that. He enjoyed renting because it meant having fewer responsibilities.
  I disagreed, and countered that renting means being more dependent on somebody else. Some landlords are excellent at responding to repair calls, but there are so many more that will leave you hanging for an indetermined amount of time, while leaks continue or appliances break. Personally, I'd rather not have the quality of life in my own home be dependent on someone who doesn't really care about me.
  Sadly, I don't have much of a choice. I would prefer being able to pick my own repair people or just fix simple things myself. Alas, like so many others, I work full time but remain stuck in the rent trap. So much for freedom.
They kinda are necessary, given how they're the byproduct of capitalism's private property model and its commodification.
You could technically remove them by having the state manage all the housing, but that's overly idealistic given how that'd go against the ruling class interests which would cause heavy lobbying by big landowners. It would also make the state a monopoly landowner which would have its own implications.
In other words, they're necessary not because they're useful, but because of how dogshit the system is.
But but who will extract the remaining surplus value that the employers missed?
People? Like IRL? I've only ever seen it happen online.
People not understanding the actual cost of owning and maintaining a house is my only argument for landlords. Or if you maintain it yourself it's a knowledge and time requirement.
Not saying landlords did a great job maintaining the rentals I've lived in. But there was definitely a point in my life where renting made more sense than owning a house.
We really need more control on rent prices so only high density housing is rentable. Or something, I don't have answers for why my shitty house is worth 70% more than it was 5 years ago.
- My housing coop charges 38% market rate rent, maintains the common area, has a property manager, and provides units fridge/stove/furnace/AC, on 46 three bedroom townhouses.
  So either landlords are wildly inefficient with their expenses, or they are taking a crazy margin over their operating expenses.
- There are companies that would do the maintenance for you, so I think if that was your concern, you could roll the dice with those while still actually owning the house.
  But I will say if you aren't going to be somewhere more than 2 years anyway (university or a work assignment), renting could make sense.
- You don't need a Lord to maintain a property though. That is the function of a superintendent, which is a role small landlords sometimes assume, and yes that is a job that should be compensated.
  But it has nothing to do with owning and rentseeking.

And then they raise rent. For what? They haven't upgraded anything. They haven't added any of that value to the property. Every year the house gets older. Cars lose value every year even if you maintain it perfectly.

And then they try to fuck you over when you leave the place by pinning all the costs of normal dilapidation on you. Fortunately where I live the law forbids it but it doesn't stop them from trying every time.
The land is what’s gaining value, not the structure on it
- friend bought a house and was super excited about it. it cost her a pretty penny.
  It had black mold and almost killed her children. The landlord claimed they had no idea (they did)
  they left (sold the house) for more than what she paid for. This was in California, the housing market is completely and utterly f****
- That is just patently untrue.
Good tenants make the neighborhood more desirable. So the rent being raised is a way to punish good Tennant, and steal their hard earn benefit from their existential labour.
If there were only a set number of cars available and creating more was prohibitively expensive, cars would appreciate in value as well.
And to be clear, I'm not talking about the house; building more of those is expensive, but doable. It's building more land that's the tricky part
- When I did a vacation in Sri Lanka our guide told us some cars appreciated in price because the government increased (I believe it was that) import taxes.
  Edit: Appreciation due to car scarcity
I'm not a landlord but the taxes go up every single year. Home insurance goes up every single year. Both often by a lot. Compared to 2019 my taxes are up 45% and my home insurance is up 500%.
The land value is up purely because they ain't making any more of it.
The cost to repair everything goes up every year. A part of my washing machine broke again. Part was $20 in 2017. Part was $60 4 months ago. Post Tarifs it will probably be closer to $100. Nevermind the labor if I can't DIY.
Plenty of reasons for costs to go up each year.
Real question is :
Why the fuck aren't the wages going up?
If that too kept up with inflation since the 1970s then we'd all be happier then pigs in shit.

Landlord said to me "property tax has gone up. This is my only form of income. Will need to increase rent"

Told him "yeah, everything has gone up and my paycheck is still the same".

Like, these types of relationships are so parasitic. This is the "nice" mom and pop style landlord too that every liberal seems to want to give a pass too.

Sure, are they less bad than the big corporate faceless landlords? Yes. But the entire relationship is the problem.

They get to justify forcing me out of my home because the value of the house that they own WENT UP.

That's why their property tax is more. They literally own something that is more valuable and making it further impossible for me to ever buy a place of my own.

If they offered to let you buy it for the fair market value of the home, would you? That's the only viable way for them to extract that house value without evicting you. A fair answer could be absolutely, and perhaps that should be something renters are given some rights to do, but just pointing out that a tax assessment doesn't mean they have usable money unless they can do something to cash in.
- I literally asked. He said he's not selling.
If that's their whole retirement investment (as they said it's their only income, no idea about us retirement details) if they don't increase your rent, their net income will GO DOWN. Prices of everything also went up for them, if you think it's hard with constant income, imagine with declining income.
The value of their house going up is useless to pay for bread.
You should get a bigger paycheck, average wage growth is around 5% in the US, higher than inflation even.
- Sounds like they should get an actual job, rather than expecting someone else to pay for their retirement; someone who probably won't get to retire themselves
- If that's their whole retirement investment maybe they should get a job

You know what's the fastest way to make landlords disappear? Ask about some broken shit around the house that they are required by law to fix. Radio silence for months guaranteed. Until the next rent increase of course.

For a lot of them, they don't even care if there's tenant turnover, especially if its a high-demand area. There's no incentive to fix a broken AC; the tenants already signed the year lease. They can get to it next year when its time to clean up the place for the re-listing.
- If it's a longer term tenant, the landlord is actually disincentivized from fixing the AC, because they can fix the AC and jack the rent way up as soon as the old, abuse tenant inevitably leaves.
  One of my friends suffered through this during the recent heat wave. They've been told there's no budget for AC despite a recent $50 rent hike.
  Their landlord is an independently wealthy multimillionaire — they don't even need the money!

We don't have an instance stance on landlord apologia, but maybe we should make one, based on the number of people from other instances defending these mooching rent-seeking parasites.

i hope you do; seeing it is a depressing reminder of how much americans think that exploitation like this is okay and even more depressing to see people exploited like this want to perpetuate it.
/me sorts by controversial

If i had Jeff Bozos money, I'd buy a bunch of houses and offer them to the homeless to get the back into society. Fucking bozo Bozos is. And that's why I'll never have Jeff Bozos money.

"understood, create a factory town and offer housing in exchange for employment." ~ Bezos
- is that not the only way to do it?
Capitalism rewards the worst most selfish hoarders of wealth. How can we build a system like this and expect this type of altruism? Makes no sense. The system was always broken.
- Oh, I know. I was just explaining why I’ll never be a billionaire. I care about people. Sad that that’s a fact of life

Hey, those buildings and apartments aren’t gonna rent themselves! /s

Rent is due in 5 days.

Once again, may I introduce you to GEORGISM.

Please, I know lemmy is a bit left leaning, and georgism are mostly libertarians/liberal, but the ideology is so centrist and common sense I'm sure even far left communist advocates can get behind it.

Leftists are aware of Goergism. They don't generally take it seriously because it's just 'one weird trick' reformism that's trying to save capitalism from itself. It doesn't change what capitalism is or the historical process it drives, it'll get clawed back immediately just like every other social democratic reform, and it would cause a full on capital revolt if you somehow magic lamp'ed it into practice such that you might as well just do the real revolution and actually overthrow capitalism for the same amount of effort.
but the ideology is so centrist and common sense
I really just commented as an excuse to lol at this line.
The reason Georgism fell out of favor on the left is because Marxism already develops beyond where Georgism falls flat. It's certainly broadly appealing, in that liberals can get behind it rather quickly, but it falls short of Marxist economics in completeness, to the point that it doesn't really bother resolving the fundamental problems with capitalist exploitation, centralization, crisis, or production and overproduction, it just focuses on rent.
It's also very difficult to get through, it's a reformist approach that depends on asking those that have full control of the economy to make it less exploitative. That doesn't happen without revolution, at which point you can go far beyond and address core, systemic issues.
Georgism is great but we also have problem with corporations so georgism isn't enough. We need socialism or at least distributism
Can you give a TLDR for this if possible
- It boils down to property tax as a means of preventing land accumulation and tax revenue generation.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
  I don’t see how that would have worked even when it was invented.
  Right now you can see how the rich own all the land and have no need to use or sell it. This way they create a shortage and can charge a higher price for the land they use or sell. IMO the only way to break this up to stop charging property tax at all - because all land ownership goes back to the state. If someone wants to use land they rent it from the state. If they do not use or misuse rented land the land goes to a different renter (or to the state).
- Georgism is an ideology broadly based on taxing the full value of land, in order to prevent rentseeking.
  So rather than taxing people for the property they built/bought, you tax the land which no one made.
  The value of the land is based on the progress society made in that area, so when you tax the full unimproved value of the land, you prevent landlords from essentially leeching on the results of society progress that they did not directly contirubute to.
  You can still buy land, but when you do you must pay full rent to the government, so technically, if the government did own all the land and lease it out for rent, it would be goergist in practice(but not in spirit, since goergism wants to protect property rights)
Hey there. Never heard of it, actually. Thanks, I'll find a time to read about it.
What I find interesting in this particular libertarian initiative so far, is that it is addressing an existing systematic issue. Almost all other libertarians I come around seem to be speaking about their and everyone else's morality and righteousness, naively thinking that once we all become moral and righteous, society would become as well.
- To be fair, you haven't heard of it because it isn't particularly relevant. Marxism already develops beyond where Georgism stops, so anyone who is disgruntled with capitalism already has a much more influential, developed, and accurate framework to go with.

You can tell it's hard earned from all the neglect

Dostoyevsky crime and punishment! Kills the landlord. Blind boy podcast on private equity becoming a massive corporate landlord? End it.

Mao? Let's actually be serious

When I married my wife and she moved in we tried renting out her house with a property management company. She got one tenant and had that tenant for over 2 years with no complaints and we never raised the rent, just enough to cover taxes going up too.

But when we wanted to move to a larger house we gave her an 8 month notice we couldn't renew since the market is so bad and we needed to sell. And my wife wasn't profiting at all, she was still in the red from the repairs and setting up the house to rent out. We offered her like $10k off the price.

Anyway long story short, the tenant gave us hell for those 8 months, and when she moved out we found she never complained about anything because she ignored all the problems which made things worse and the house needed thousands of more dollars to prepare and sell.

She'll never try being a landlord again, she hated it and the tenant shit talked her "landlord" on Facebook all the time like she was some evil monster.

I don't know how anyone else does the landlord thing, this must be all the ones run by evil corporations.

This was a house my wife bought for like $150-180k originally.

Cry us a river
Have you tried getting a job?
No sympathy lmao, you dont get to cry
No sympathy for landlords.
Tough shit. Must be so inconvenient for you to not keep up on repairs to your own building. That's on you.
Standard rent is at least 1-1.5% of current not original value per month and taxes are about that per year.
you probably bought for 150 you earned 100,000 when it ballooned up to 250k rented it for at least 2500 a month x24 months or 60,000 paid 6000 each to taxes and management pocketed another 48,000
When you sold realizing that cool 100k you naturally had to do all the repairs and upkeep you had been putting off so you ended up coming out of pocket for "thousands"
In the end you netted 140k for doing 10 hours work once whereas the median worker earns 200-250
You probably charged here so much to ensure you made the "market rate" eg people like you that she had no funds saved to actually move and you probably nickel and dimed her deposit away for stuff that was actually on you.
Where am I wrong?
- Wow lots of assumptions here. My wife only rented it out enough to cover her expenses (mortgage, insurance, property management, etc). She only netted $100 a month as "profit" but that doesn't include taxes at the end of the year, and she was paying towards $6000 she owed to house repairs. It doesn't include repairs needed from normal wear and tear and tenant damage.
  A lot of your assumptions are based on profit towards selling the house, which in this situation means its not sustainable on its own without you covering everything out of pocket.
  The real kicker here is that her tenant made more money than my wife. The tenant was making at least $10,000/month per bank statements.
  Your other comments are false also. State laws here are very clear on what can be charged as a deposit.
  None of that was my point though, and I realize sharing that here on a meme was dumb on my part. I'm not looking for sympathy, I was just feeling a rare moment of sharing an experience often overlooked: two hard working people who independently buy a starter home, meet later, and one moves in with the other and tries to rent out their house. Landlords aren't always evil but your reply demonstrated all the immediate assumptions and biases. After all, why should anyone be allowed to own more than one home, right? Especially if they try to rent it out? I guess Air BNB is better.
  A lot of us lived in rentals and heard talk about the dream of rental supplemental income, but it's not all it's cracked up to be and not really feasible without an insane rate or having enough cash to not pay a mortgage. It's probably why more companies are trying to buy up houses.
Yeah being a landlord makes you into the bad guy despite intentions. You'll always make back whatever "losses" you incurred in equity, because we have a crazy for profit housing market.
Landlord/renter is an abominable financial relationship.
I have managed a building with 8 units before. Never again.
I once had a lady's ceiling collapse. I then come to learn she's been putting a bucket out to catch water for months, never told anyone about it. What should have been a quick 15 minute fix ended up being a total nightmare.
Had one dude who was a heroin addict. Kept flushing needles. The plumbing had to be taken apart multiple times to get his needles out.
Had a lady who kept adopting cats, wouldn't get them fixed. She would then let them out into the hall to spray the walls with what was basically straight ammonia, except grosser.
I could go on all day, trash fires, fucking litter, a phycological inability to break down cardboard. I think my blood pressure just spiked writing this.
You couldn't pay me to be a landlord. People are awful.
- If it's any consolation, I'm in an 8-unit owner-occupied condo rn and my kitchen ceiling collapsed last week because the HOA refused to fix a roof leak for almost two years. So now what should have been a couple hundred dollar roof patch is thousands of dollars coming out of my HOA payments.
- Bullshit you just didn't do any maintenance
Very similar situation.
Mod removed my post without reason. Maybe cussing offended them.
The market seems to self select for bad landlords. All the well intentioned ones I know got burned and stopped renting.
- 'well intentioned' and landlord dont go togther
- based tenant fuck your eldery leechlords

NGL if you are paying 2/3 of your income to rent you need to move to another part of the world.

Owning 1 extra property and renting: Okay

Owning apartment complex and renting: Okay

Owing millions of single family homes and duplexes and rent hiking/price hiking the entire market: not okay

Owning 1 slave: Okay
Owning a dozen slaves: Okay
Owning hundreds of slaves: not okay.
/s obviously
/uj
Of course slavery and landlordism aren't identical in every respect, but they both are based on a parasite class doing no work, and extracting labor value from people who do. Large-scale vs small-scale doesn't make landlording any more ethical.
- Do you have a problem with public housing or are landlords okay when it’s the state?
I wish people here understand this. It costs money to buy property, and so effort needed to be applied into buying one was done beforehand by being good with money. Rich people don't need to go through this, and should rightfully be criticized.
- Being exploited in the past does not justify exploitation on your part in the future.

Landlord = banned.
- Hell yeah
- So you're visa/MC now?
  Don't like it? BANNED!
- What did he say? Not a landlord myself, but I'm always curious to hear both sides. I think there can be good landlords, had one myself.. Didn't raise rent on us, took care of the place when things went wrong, even offered to sell the place to us but we weren't ready financially at the time..
  Some people choose to rent instead of buying for the sake of not having to keep up with house maintenance, and in that case, the landlord I speak of, I'd argue was a good landlord. Win win for both parties. Not common, I know, but speaking in absolutes is rarely productive.
Wow. Just outing yourself as a leech for the whole community to see. Bold move

This is such a shit show of a post.

Landlord = banned. Your kids will get back at you some day, no doubt about that.

I know this will be downvoted to hell, but this whole let's rally against landlords is kind of stupid in my opinion.

You can say the exact same thing about a bank that gives you a lone, they do zero work and get money.

Or a company that leases or rents out cars.

For a landlord you can make the argument that a home is a primary life necessity. But when you borrow money from a bank it's pretty much the same thing.

Some people don't want to stay in a place too long and like the option to rent. Also it's not like a landlord hard zero risks, you can get tenants that are horrible and trash a place.

Just to be clear I'm not a landlord myself, but also not someone that just hates them because it's a thing now.

I think we should make the same argument against banks, leasing, and other highly financialized capital.
- Maybe but there is a market for it. To me it's crazy people (students) in the Netherlands pay 15 euros a month for a bicycle, while you can find a working second hand one for about 100 euros.
  Same goes for cars, I always save and buy second hand, I would never even consider borrowing for a car. Rather have an older model than debt.
  But some people are different and don't mind to pay extra for less hassle, like the bicycle thing. They replace it when you get a flat tire for example.
  For some people that's also what they like about renting a house, roof has a leak? Landlord has to fix it.
Also it's not like a landlord hard zero risks
Then they should sell instead of renting.
- In the Netherlands the laws got a lot stricter in the last few years (because we have a housing crisis) a side effect is that some landlords sold rental houses. The price too buy a house did not go down at all. But for anyone that wanted to rent a house it got much and much worse. There where people outbiding other people on rent. It got ridiculous.
like the option
Nobody likes renting. Nobody likes moving. If there wasn't the premium cost from renting, there would be less pressure on these people to change their life arrangements.
- When I was in college, renting made sense. I wasn't going to be there but like two years. I wouldn't have hardly accumulated any equity and had the pain of trying to sell at the end.
  I've known people with like two year work assignments where renting made sense.
  I cannot fathom it, but I have a coworker who swears by renting even though he hasn't moved in years and has no intention to move ever. I think the 'mantaining your own house is scary' articles hit him hard and he's now convinced that owning a household means you are somehow constantly having to fix things yourself for lots of money. So he may have been bamboozled, but certainly limited term living makes sense.
- That's not really true, one of my friends rented an apartment for about 2 years specifically because he didn't knew if he wanted to live abroad or in a different city. Same goes for my sister she really didn't want any long term commitments to have the freedom to go anywhere. She didn't even wanted a 1 year phone contract.
  Lots of young people rent because it gives them more freedom and less burden when they want to move.
  Also about the premium cost, it really depends on the laws, like in the Netherlands after you have rented a house for over 1 year, the landlord can only raise the rent a certain percentage. Some people have been renting the same apartment for 30+ years and pay a ridiculous low rent.
Brother, what Lemmy instance do you think this community is on? You aren't going to get a good discussion with this topic here.