Question - is it unethical to be a landlord IF your only rental properties are garages in an area with plentiful and free street parking, and the land couldn’t be used for housing if the garages were torn down?
the land couldn’t be used for housing
why not?
But generally yes, garages are less of a problem. But there is no ethical renting (under capitalism).
It’s a 12ft by 20ft garage on a tiny subdivision of a house’s plot of land. Not zoned for housing and not large enough to even fit a mobile home. Just cut off of someone’s backyard.
Renting out commercial properties are not a problem. Nobody needs a warehouse or an office or a hard stand to live. Most businesses either buy their own property or they need the flexibility to outgrow small offices, or to rent a hard stand for a few months or years.
Renting out residential property is and always will be parasite behaviour.
Facts that concern me:
- they are on Twitter
- they use a combined username (gross)
- they list vacations as number one
Henry George’s ideas will catch on again someday, hopefully.
Here’s a tip poor people; just have money!
TenantSlaveMooching off of others to fund your life style and giving nothing back in return
opens envelope
What’s something considered classy if you’re rich, but trashy if you’re poor?
Housing prices are pretty high in cities. But you can buy your own piece of land in a more rural setting and build a small cottage yourself, maybe a 2 bdrm, 1 bath home. I believe this is possible for less than $100k at the right location. Start with a used cheap RV or mobile home if you have to.
Trump deported all of the construction workers
I don’t support those deportations. But why not do it yourself?
Groceries and vacations aren’t even liabilities. Fella doesn’t understand accounting well enough to fake use it properly.
For the SUM of your tenants’ rent to pay for your mortgage and most of the upkeep? Probably fair.
For ONE tenant to cover the whole mortgage? Geez, that’s not nice, to put it softly.
It dpends. I rented out my old house for about 5 years because I couldn’t afford to sell it (underwater) mortgage was ~$500 rent was $650.
Well okay if one tenant is renting the whole building it’s different.
Every job involves having other people pay for your living costs.
My job doesn’t involve making a profit off of arguably the most important thing a human needs for survival… Just saying.
So you have a problem with farmers?
Why would I have a problem with farmers? Farmers actually work to produce something, so it’s not really a valid comparison. Landlords create nothing and provide nothing of value to society.
You know, farming is not defined by, “profiting from the things you grow.” Co-ops exist. But yes, in the current hyper-capitalist environment, most farmers are probably going to need to sell some shit to survive.
But there’s a massive difference between farmers in Iowa raking in tons of cash (including a shit ton of government subsidies) for providing more corn than we even need, and self-sustaining farms and/or communities that are not predatory.
For example, the Amish are farmers. They seem to do just fine without price gouging.
The key difference is that these goods and services wouldn’t exist if you were not paid to do the job.
If landlords didn’t exist, then all housing would either be government-distributed, socially-owned, or obtained through mortgages.
If the workers building those houses didn’t exist, then the house wouldn’t either.
The only difference between a system for housing with a landlord, and one without a landlord, is that the landlord is an intermediary that shaves some money off the top any time money is used to pay for housing, even when the building is already fully paid off, or they aren’t there, and your money just covers the cost of construction and maintenance directly.
They act like everyone could do this.
If everyone did this, the system would fail, because the profit here is scooped off the top with no actual production or service.
The product/service is the use of the property for the specified time.
How is this any different from renting a SeeDo for an hour?
And if everyone did this when they were able to, rents across the board would be dirt cheap.
How is this any different from renting a SeeDo for an hour?
Well, one has to do with recreation, and the other has to do with basic necessities of humans.
It would also require everyone to own 4+ houses which isn’t exactly feasible
It would require a lot of housing density for everyone to own four dwellings (and would kill rent demand well and good), but I wouldn’t call it infeasible. For everyone to have a quarter acre lawn and a 2,000 square foot house that shares no walls with neighbors? With those additional requirements having everyone own four is infeasible, sure, but a belief that’s the only dwelling worth owning is how we have throttled our housing supply in the first place.
I had to rant in a couple of comments because I drives me crazy when people defend leeching.
On a more constructive note: Housing cooperatives. I think they should be more widespread. Some people come together to build a house and then live in it for the cost it takes to actually support it. No crazy big apartments with a reasonable amount of people (roughly one bedroom per person), shared luxury such as gardens, in house shops, hell even a pool if you want. There is no leeching, just collective ownership.
What if some people do not fit into some pre-made construction of how some dictator imagines a “nice living situation”? Every person is an individual with individual needs. Presuming, that a single bedroom is big or small enough for every single person is absolutely undermining the fact of how diverse people actually are, as are their visions of their own lives.
Cooperatives are democratic, the members vote on what it means to have a nice living situation.
If there are ten people with ten different expectations, they would all vote for something, in summary/conclusion, “in the middle”, which would make nobody happy. The best would be, if everyone could choose for themselves and that is the case right now, except many people perhaps cannot afford, what they’d wish for. Still, better than having a “democracy”, where nobody is truly happy.
The case right now is, if you can’t afford what you want, you can’t choose it. They don’t get to choose for themselves, the market chooses for them!
If I have to choose between market decision making and democratic decision making, I’ll choose democracy. At the very least, a democratic process leaves no one homeless.
A wealth and property cap would make way more sense and solve way more problems.
This species isn’t ready for it yet, though, and continues to suffer accordingly.
Future generations are laughing.
Why not both?
If you want to collectively own houses, nobody is stopping you.
The property cap is a lot easier in practice. You can’t hide land!
Housing cooperatives (wiki) are quite great. Where I’m from they are rather common, but unfortunately the ‘buy in’ costs have increased a ton in the last couple decades. Even then, paying e.g. a third of what a comparable owner apartment costs, still makes it a lot more affordable for many people.
Wait, do I understand correctly that in your place, the buy-in costs are roughly a third of the value (insured value or similar) of the appartment?
The type that looks up to Clarance Thomas.
And if you do really well, you might even be able to get Clarence Thomas to look up to you!
Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables track #4
