Land value tax would solve this when combined with a UBI from the revenue it generates
Ok, yeah I can see you’re filling this community with fire content
inflation: exists
if the revenue from the tax is used for the UBI, there is no change in the money supply compared to the current situation. So, can you explain where the inflation you’re predicting is coming from?
Rent seeking, unless you also combine it with rent control and a bunch of other measures and have a monopoly on violence.
Inflation comes from people seeking to make more money, not just an increase in money supply.
That’s the benefit of a land value tax. It captures all the economic rent, without penalizing investment in improvements.
If you’re an anarchist, then the economics work the same way in a geoanarchist society.
LVT doesn’t really address the fundamental class antagonism between landlords and tenants.
Let’s say landlords pay more taxes because of LVT, and that goes to UBI. Landlords can just jack up the prices to make their money back. The only people who benefit are people who don’t rent.
Also geoanarchism doesn’t sound like anarchism, unless we are being pejorative toward anarchism.
I agree that LVT doesn’t address the fundamental class antagonism. It only addresses economic rent.
Landlords can’t just jack up prices. LVT doesn’t distort prices because the supply of land is perfectly inelastic - the revenue comes entirely out of landlord surplus. UBIs so far haven’t caused significant inflation, which makes sense if the total amount distributed equals the total amount taxed.
http://www.ozarkia.net/bill/anarchism/library/Geoanarchism-FredFoldvary.html
Okay, imagine a hypothetical. You’re a landlord with 90 percent occupancy rate across 100 apartments. For simplicity let’s say they all pay you 1000 dollars a month. With the lvt tax you pay 100 dollars a month per apartment. Your renters simultaneously get 90 dollars a month(let us assume that renters make up 50 percent of the population and slightly more than half of the tax comes from residential land, giving us 90 dollars)
You’re going to raise rent by 90 dollars, at least. Maybe 111 dollars, to compensate for the empty apartments, if you want to continue making the same amount of money.
yeah, years of economic science dating back to post WW2. not just an emotional comment on lemmy.
They asked a fair question. And economics was more a branch of philosophy than a science at that time.
lol mfw
Ok thanks for your contribution Dr. Science.
I think the pro-landlord commenters are missing the fundamental point:
In the “please pay me to live in my extra house” scenario, the problem is not that someone is renting your extra house. The problem is that you and others can afford to have multiple houses, so much so that the person renting your house cannot buy their first house. If the cost of houses increases as the availability of houses decreases, there is an obvious outcome to the richest people buying all the houses and renting them out.
As a landlord (renting out my basement) Amen. Fuck people with multiple homes for the purpose of “passive income”.
Yeah I think people forget that these kinds of complaints and memes arent geared at the nice old lady who rents the unit upstairs and who,along with her husband, in the 60s/70s invested in some cheap real estate to help get them through retirement.
This is more he big boys and girls who have eviction down to a science, who dont repair things on time, who are hard to get a hold of, and who raise rent on the regular because despite their overhead remaining the same “everyone else is doing it so good luck!”
The irony is that a lot of the “pro landlord” development and laws favor the big wealthy LLCs and very rich individuals over the mom and pops supplementing their fixed incomes.
And getting money for it 👍
People being like “tax landlords more” No, do what the cpc did. Stop enforcing property rights. All you have to do is take over the local sheriff or city court and refuse to enforce or write any eviction orders except for serious safety reasons.
Some of those landlords will form gangs to enforce their property rights, those landlords are myopic jackasses who are going to end up killed by peasant… er… tenants if the local law enforcement doesn’t step in to break up those gangs without killing anyone first.
Who pays the property tax then?
They do, until they realize that their not going to get their land back, and then they’ll sell their land for pennies to either the tenants or some investment company who can absorb the losses for much longer. Eventually the property will end up owned by the residents who will pay taxes assuming you can maintain power (you’re basically set electorally, you’re the group that did land reform, you just have to worry about capital strikes and coups, so you should probably do a hard purge(fire all the pigs, throw the ones in jail for illegal activities they’d previously have gotten away with) and reorganization of the local police and should invest in arming the local organized proletariat to dissuade that)(capital strikes can be prevented because dissolving the rent seeking class is beneficial to sectors of capital too) who will pay property taxes, as the property tax and maintenance costs are much lower than rent.
The tenants’ money was paying the property taxes to begin with.
So what’s the consensus on landlords who do it as a side hustle
“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.”
-Literally Adam Smith. I dont even need to get out the Mao quotes.
The problem isn’t the scale the problem is the class dynamic.
Honestly, Adam Smith gets a worse rap than he deserves because all the rich people abused his ideas to peddle unregulated, free-wheeling capitalism. Even Smith knew the inherent danger of privatization and monopolization of land and rampant rent-seeking.
Kinda like how Nietzsche’s sister exploited and misrepresented his work after his death to further the Nazi cause.
It seems to be a common thing with a lot of the classical economists that they all recognized (and wrote quite a bit about) these problems of monopolism and rent-seeking, but wealthy elites cherry-picked their books to serve their own economic agenda.
Imo taking houses out of the market to rent them out shouldn’t be allowed.
Lol, no nuance here. Landlords are the devil. I try to inject some moderation once in a while. We have a rental, it’s in fantastic shape. We’ve never raised the rent. We’ve spent so much on improvements and repairs we’ll not see a profit on it for the next 3 years. Tax write off? Sure… but nonetheless landlords are the devil. Doesn’t matter if we worked out asses off to afford it.
E: what follows is people willing to subscribe to luxuries like entertainment, but complain about fair prices for necessities. Why bother being decent when you get shit on anyway.
I would argue that owning additional property in an environment where there is a housing shortage is implicitly unethical even if you’re trying to run it ethically. Only argument I can think of against that is that you’re keeping it from shittier landlords and corporations. But still, denying others the opportunity to grow their wealth through property ownership causes poverty on a mass scale. Not any one person’s fault, but still.
We charge well under mortgage rates for rent. It’s affordable. I hate to throw this out there, but our intent is never to “extract” the max profit from someone. If someone wants to rent at the upper extent of their ability to pay it’s not what we’re forcing on someone.
The only reason you own a second house is for profit. A profit you are doing directly from an other individual. You can twist that how you want, it’s the reality. You are doing it respectfully and are providing a service. But an artificial one.
What if it’s run at cost? (And the property value were to stay level)
If its run at cost, why aren’t you selling it to the tenants?
You’re still extracting wealth from the tenant, and the tenant is only losing money. You’re still preventing the tenant from building their wealth through property ownership.
The ethical thing to do in this situation would be to sell the house to the tenant at a price proportional to the rent, minus what they’ve already paid in rent to this point.
Sorry I genuinly don’t follow. If I were to rent out at cost, that means if the tenant were the owner, they’d have to pay the same cost as well. So they’re losing the same amount of money either way.
And how would they be building wealth through property, if the property value doesn’t rise? They would buy the flat for say 50k$, and then own 50k$ worth of property
minus what they’ve already paid in rent to this point
I think you’re assuming that I would be paying off a loan with their rent? By renting at cost I meant their rent covers maintanance/upkeep
It can be fairly priced, but that doesn’t really change anything I said before. It’s not how the property is run that’s the problem, it’s that it’s owned by someone who isn’t living there during a time where that, on its own, creates problems.
Yeah, youre doing it out of the goodness of your heart and not to have a renter pay for you to own an appreciating asset. /s
Why do you think any business does what it does? That’s an absurd assertion that anyone would do that for nothing. We take good care of our tenants because we like having good people there, and that’s worth a lot. We play the long game. Your /s is useless after that post.
Why do you think any business does what it does?
Yeah, profit is legitimately a problem, this guy Adam Smith wrote about it in a book and then Marx wrote a whole series of tomes doing a more comprehensive analysis about how it is unsustainable and to the detriment of humanity.
We’re not interested in infinite growth and owe no loyalty to shareholders. Our rates are static.
Yeah, youre a member of the rentier class, not the capitalist class.
The critique is actually different for rentierism vs capitalism, even most capitalist economicists hate rentierism. You’re collectively a parasitic class even to the capitalists because you increase their operating costs indirectly for no benefit. Earnestly no offense, as class analysis is about understanding structures, not moralizing.
You still benefit from extractivist class dynamics. Unless you’re going to be in the red even after selling the properties you own, even if you’re charging so low that you lose money in the short term. But I’m guessing that on aggregate over time you’re gaining money in the short term.
Well, that’s an opinion.
Typically most businesses aren’t profiting from the threat of withholding basic human needs.
Really?
Groceries?
Electricity?
Fuel?
I think you need to adjust your thinking.
Well actually…
(I get your point though, it is very direct with landlordism)
You’re literally my parents. They were long term landlords, bought properties for nothing in the 90’s rented them for 20-30 years and then sold them. Most properties were long term rentals, people lived there for 5+ years, one lady had 6 kids in 10 years in one of their houses. Rents in their area are ~$1200-2000, my parents were still renting at $700 because the place was paid off and the people living there had been there for nearly a decade.
Side hustle landlords ain’t the enemy, it’s the corporate landlords that are the true problem. Unfortunately the people being oppressively fucked don’t see a difference and it’s hard to blame them.
Hope your side hustle works out for you and I hope you stay one of the good ones.
EDIT: My parents both have full time jobs, having rentals wasn’t a job for them. They rented to pay the mortgage and pay for upkeep. The long term plan for them was to sell the houses and retire, not live off rent for perpetuity. They rented the properties at a rate that allowed them to pay the mortgage off quickly and pay for landlord repairs (roof, HVAC, water heater, septic tank, etc).
No they’re still part of the problem just not the biggest problem.
So here’s a story from other side of a coin. When I got married I decided to get a small house in the suburbs as my work is remote so I can work from anywhere. But after getting a baby me and my SO decided that we would live near my in-laws house to help with taking care of my baby for the time being. So we rented a house near my in-laws and to keep the house occupied I decided to rent out the house for a cheap price. It’s basically half the market price. Soon enough I got a renter. Being too trusting of others I decided to not ask for a deposit because the people renting are basically a friend of a friend.
But after they finished their rental period when I came to the house it was basically wrecked, they destroyed the toilets, one of the doors, and generally left the place in shambles. It’s amazing what kind of damage you can do in a short period of time, and the amount of money that I spent fixing the damage is more than the rent money that I got.
oh yeah, judging by the french poster this is montreal. Montreal is an utter shitshow, an acquaintance of mine was the victim of a landlord who only took cash, refused her payment for months, took her and other tenants to court over it, won and made her pay thousands back, she had no warning, no letters and only learned she was supposed to turn up to court days before, meaning she had no lawyers. The reason her subhuman landlord did this? Force his tenants to leave under threat of “justice” to break their contracts and bring in new tenants with higher rents. Mind you this isnt and isolated case, in Montreal you can’t raise rent, so landlords behave like this, because theyre only interested in fucking over people and earning money nothing else. So fuck landlords, and fuck you if you think landlords are necessary or defensible (theyre not)
Yeah, rent control isn’t the solution people think it is. It turns out markets are high because of demand and supply. Not solely due to greed. What we need is more housing and to delete nimbyism.
“NFTs” were an attempt to rent-seek on the internet, demanding kickbacks for the dubious ownership of an entry on a ledger that is usually associated with an ugly picture.
it’s not a job. it’s an investment.
basically like trading or renting out equipment.(but yeah treating homes people live in as investment is pretty fucked up, as that leads to poor treatment of tenants)
I mean it CAN be a job if they also do repairs, landscaping, and/or preventative maintenance. Almost none of them do it though.
I think it is probably useful rhetorically and in analysis to differentiate between landlording as owning property and doing maintenance as doing a job even if one person is doing both
Rent extraction: Passive cash flow from doing nothing but owning something without actually producing anything. Such income can be used to buy more such cash flows until monopolies form. Unless monopolies are broken up by government, monopoly owners collude to maximize rent extraction until heads roll during the next revolution.
i like how this is somewhere in france, because i could just find it unexpectedly
Could be Quebec.
indeed it could
deleted by creator
They live in it, it’s their “home”.
“Home” as a concept, not a piece of property.
It’s just a really weird passive phrasing that implies it was your home before the landlord bought it.
It’s more like they bought a house and then you rented it, at which point it becomes your home.
(Not that the former never happens, I just don’t think the meme was calling out a relatively niche situation.)
There are so many things to criticize about the housing market that it’s weird to rely on tricks of language rather than factual arguments. Like, “Renting out property that you own, and complaining about the upkeep required to keep it rentable” is much more accurate but not as memeable I guess.
it’s all fun and games until everyone wants to live on the coast for free
deleted by creator
That’s kinda the point
deleted by creator
this comment sounds too “haha owned libtard” for me to take it seriously
It shouldn’t.
Yes. This is exactly the distinction made between personal and private property. The landlord owns it as private property, but it’s the renter that uses it for daily life purposes.
The landlord owns the property, the person renting possesses it.
So it is the person renting’s home, owned by the landlord.
Think home as in a place you live, vs house as in a place where people can live. The landlord owns a bunch of houses, which are themselves other peoples’ homes
deleted by creator
I know people like to shit on landlords, but owning and properly maintaining a home requires a ton of work and money. You should be spending 1% of your homes value on maintenance each year, which many people don’t/can’t budget for.
A good landlord takes care of that mess for you.
I know several people who sold their homes and moved into apartments because they were sick of the hassle of home ownership.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no plans of doing that myself, but the ever growing list of maintenance tasks is getting exhausting.
You should be spending 1% of your homes value on maintenance each year, which many people don’t/can’t budget for.
Yeah, that money comes from the rent that the tenants are paying. This isn’t rocket science, it’s financial competence.
If you’re a business owner, but can’t budget in expenses then you’re a bad business owner.
This is the reason why some people recommend we have a landlord licence. We’re playing with people’s living conditions here.
the ever growing list of maintenance tasks is getting exhausting.
This is why some landlords delegate those tasks to other people (e.g. tradesmen, property managers, etc).
That’s not the work of a landlord. That’s the work of a plumber.
You are nothing but a parasite. A ticket scalper for being alive.
Who’s downvoting this truth?
Bots, Trolls, or spoiled rich kids who think the world is just.
Even you know you’re wrong with how you use “should” and “good”. It means you know many don’t do these things and you justify the whole by the exceptions.
I know people like to shit on landlords, but owning and properly maintaining a home requires a ton of work and money. You SHOULD be spending 1% of your homes value on maintenance each year, which many people don’t/can’t budget for. A GOOD landlord takes care of that mess for you. I know several people who sold their homes and moved into apartments because they were sick of the hassle of home ownership. Don’t get me wrong, I have no plans of doing that myself, but the ever growing list of maintenance tasks is getting exhausting.
Also your anecdotes are terrible. I know way more than several people who would do mostly anything to own a home and when surveys show “…(88%) would rather own their home than rent, nearly half of those who currently rent fear they’ll never own a home.” https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/homeownership-renting-survey/
Fuck landlords.
Removed by mod
I don’t disagree, and I’ve had landlords that were decent people who took good care of the properties. Still, the fact that someone can neglect their property and make it mainly someone else’s (the tenant’s) problem is just another reason this system sucks.
Exactly. We shouldn’t have to rely on our landlord being a decent person. We should live in a housing market where landlords have to take proper care of their properties or else face vacancy. It should be an actual competitive market, where landlords have to compete to attract tenants, rather than tenants compete to attract a landlord. The negotiating power imbalance is completely wack in so many cities.
Yeah, there absolutely needs to be a board like the labor board that investigates those types of issues for the tenants at no cost to them. I know some places have them, but I think it needs to be a federal system instead of a state/municipality system.
We can mitigate it with responsive boards and authorities, but this disconnect between the owner and resident (the same disconnect that sometimes leads to tenants trashing the property) is inherent to the system. As long as renting a primary residence is a thing, the problem isn’t going away. Not fully.
I’m very sure you’re not taking a loss by renting out your property… that money pays for the maintenance. And the surplus, which, let’s be honest, is a lot… will go into your pockets.
Here in India the situation is really fucked. People buy appartments with loans. Rent it out… pay off the monthly loan payments with the rent income. It’s literally free real estate for the rich.
I know several people who sold their homes and moved into apartments because they were sick of the hassle of home ownership.
If you’re going to lie, at least make it believable.
How is this not believable lol? You act like renting is some kind of degradation and owning is some kind of release from slavery.
Lots of things about home ownership suck donkey balls, and there are lots of benefits to renting. I’ve done both for significant chunks of my adult life, and while my life situation is currently such that I prefer owning my place, I can absolutely see myself opting to rent under certain circumstances.
You’re entitled to your opinion, even if it’s wrong.
You’re right, but the demographic on this site means you’re always going to get downvoted straight to hell.
