Wait so is… uhhh how? Like you’re literally not allowed to live somewhere unless you own it?? What about short term rentals and vacations? Or is the idea that we live in some kinda socialist utopia where homes are just idk assigned to people via lottery?
There are plenty of mechanisms that can be employed (as there already are in many countries) to ensure profit is not made from essential living. You either own or have strict rent control which tends to mean many properties are publicly owned. Recreational stay is different, it is part of a hospitality industry which provides an additional service on top of what fundamental housing provides.
So is someone supposed to rent a hotel room for 3 years when they move away from their home town to go to college?
No, all housing should be publicly owned to prevent landlordism and accumulation of capital, so where you will be moving from and moving to will all be owned socially regardless, the way you pick which housing you will use as your personal property for that period of time or any period of time does not have to change at all from how it is now: a website.
That’s the ideal. For the time being, we should have more social housing and levy massive taxes on landlords, forcing them to either sell and turn that to social housing, taking it off the “market” permanently or pay enormous taxes that: 1) Fund socialized housing, 2) Make purchasing properties as investments unprofitable and 3) Fund building more (alongside nationalizing construction).
I used the words “socialize”, “nationalized” and “publicly owned” interchangeably here. The answers differ on who you ask, but the above is what we should be doing, IMO.
In theory the same is true for a landlord who is expected to maintain the homes they are renting out.
Yes, but you don’t pay a landlord and a cleaner and a plumber the same, why?
Because they derive value not from their labour but from supply and demand, thus those who own assets derive value primarily from the rarity of such assets. This pressure for increasing rarity is why capitalism is a failure where the overall trend is downward, where the few hoard assets they get off other assets, and the masses who trade in their labour have that labour become increasingly less and less valuable.
The idea would be that you don’t get to own somebody else’s home. Why on earth do you equate that with not getting to exist somewhere on vacation?
Instead of looking for gotchas, why not imagine how that would work without someone at the top demanding a passive income?
Okay, I’ll bite. I own a house. Now suppose I buy another house. It’s empty. It’s not someone else’s home. Under the proposed rule (“you don’t get to own somebody else’s home”), I can’t rent the house-shaped building to someone as a residence. So now instead, I’m turning the second house into a pig farm and hiring laborers to raise and slaughter pigs on it, because the state insists that I have to put the land to work. [That’s what property tax is.]
I’m still profiting off of someone else’s labor, the would-be tenant is homeless, and I’m destroying a neighborhood. Somehow this doesn’t seem like a win to me–for anyone.
I am strongly in favor of protections for tenants: no one should be constructively evicted, rents should be controlled everywhere, and price-fixing by landlord cartels should result in prison sentences. BUT rental residences arise as a natural consequence of the freedom to contract. The solution to slumlords who fund entire generations of descendents by lucking into a valuable tower at the turn of the century is not “getting rid of landlords.” It’s just tax.
Full disclosure: I’m not a landlord, but I’ve both rented and am fortunate enough to own my own home now. I have also litigated both sides of evictions. I’ve seen bad landlords put the screws to impoverished tenants, and I’ve also seen spiteful tenants utterly destroy properties with essentially no recourse. This is not a problem you solve with magical thinking.
Just because you can’t rent it doesn’t mean you can’t use it as part of an investment vehicle. You can offer a private mortgage or land contract, for example. In either case, the occupant of the property is the deed holder. The terms of the agreement are permanent, and established from the start. You can’t arbitrarily increase the cost year after year. They earn equity from day one. You earn interest on the value borrowed from you.
Even without going full ‘free housing for everyone’ utopia, it would be nice if the rent students currently pay to landlords was recoverable when the space is no longer needed. The same way people paying mortgages can just sell their house even before it is fully paid off. We wouldn’t need to drastically reshape society in order to allow people to invest in their own futures rather than shovelling most of what they have into a landlord’s pocket.
State-owned housing, or housing cooperatives.
Even in a Socialist system, it would not be “utopia” or other such idealistic nonsense. It would be similar to current housing markets, just without a profit motive and thus a desire to satisfy needs over gaining income. Much lower rent costs (maintenance and building new housing), but you still apply for housing based on availability.
Playing the devil’s advocate here: Under capitalism, you could also see it as a provision of services where the landlord invests in the means of production (the building) and provides the service of letting people stay there for a certain amount of money. The offered services include the maintenance of the building. If a landlord is keeping a building poorly maintained and/or expects an over the top rent, then this is simply a bad service.
But well, this obviously doesn’t work out as soon as you consider a safe place to live a basic human right that mustn’t be commodified.
You’re describing a property manager. They can be the same person as the landlord, but they don’t have to be.
you don’t need to play the devil’s advocate. There’s plenty of libs here doing it earnestly.
It also assumes that the landlord is paying for the building with his own money instead of getting a loan.
The bank provides the money to build a house, the tenant pays the bank off and somehow at the end of this process the building belongs to the landlord.
This is the rub in some ways, but in others who risks their credit/capital and who also has the foresight to navigate the modern home building issues of financing a new home build for 2 years in many places without a shovel even hitting earth as permits and red tape are cleared? *It costs almost $100,000 just to get a permit in my North American city which the city keeps.
I chose to rent as I want to live where I want and don’t want to deal with the issues of home ownership once the home is built or the taxes, however just the journey to building a home is no walk in the park and has changed a great deal since our great grandparents could just build any old house/shack they wanted on land they paid very little for as no one was living in the areas beyond the natives that once called these areas home.
I’m not even sure the cabin my grandfather built in the 70s on recreational property in a remote area that he ended up retiring to could even be built today.
In the cities where real estate pricing is through the roof due to demand, and occupancy is at record lows, those that can take the financial hit from delays and the costs to build a home are at present the only ones seeing homes being built in these conditions so the market in terrible ways have created a situation right or wrong of rewarding that initial capital investment as who else in their right mind would go through that just to have less than nothing in the end to hand it over to a tenant without a full refund of all of those costs in the first month by the tenant?
Without these builders I wonder how many renters would be able to fund paying for the land for 2 years, then the materials for building the home, and the labor, then navigate the city, and manage the builders and trades, while working at their job full time (not related to home building in many cases) while living somewhere else during this process along waiting for a close with city approval to occupy once completed which might push this to 3 years?
Paying both the bank and then your rent to live somewhere during this process isn’t cheap either.
If the market relied on monthly renters for home building I suspect MANY more of us would be living in tents or campers… Which is also happening in the current system too but perhaps not at the same degree?
How do we as a society trigger the removal of red tape, nimbys, and fund the building costs of higher density housing might be a better question to ask as these challenges need to be tackled to see more homes built. Getting around the reward paying for the large upfront costs of building homes needs to be navigated too.
Unfortunately moving further west is no longer an option due to the west having run out for many of us.
So owning a fleet of rental cars is being a social parasite and not a job?
“Owning things” is not a job, correct. Making a living owning property is not a service to society.
Doing the labour to repair property is a service. Doing the filing to keep records of usage and repair is a service. Taking a cut because your name is on a deed? That’s just stealing from the people who did the work.
I have to agree with those others who suggest that banning landlords is not the way to go.
However, the power dynamics should be significantly shifted. And if those shifts mean some landlords decide to exit the market? So be it.
- Tenants should not be able to be evicted for any reason other than: damaging the property, being significantly (maybe 6 months?) behind on rent, the owner or an immediate family member wants to move in, significant renovations are needed (with strong enforcement to ensure these last two are actually done, and not used as a fake excuse). No ability to use evictions as a reprisal for complaining about the conditions.
- Tenants should be entitled to treat the place basically as their own. That means any minor reversible modification should be permitted, including painting and hanging up photos.
- No restrictions on pets other than those which would normally come with local ordinances and animal welfare laws.
- Rental inspections every 3 months is absurd. Maybe the first after 3 months, then 6 months, then annually after that at best.
- Strict rules about landlords being required to maintain the property to a comfortable condition. Harsh penalties if they fail to do so, as well as the ability for the tenant to get the work done themselves and make the landlord pay for it, if the landlord does not get it done in a reasonable time.
And tangentially, to prevent property owners just leaving their homes without a long-term tenant: significantly increased rates/taxes for homes that are unoccupied long-term, or which are used for short-term accommodation (e.g. Airbnb). Additionally, state-owned housing with highly affordable pricing should make up a substantial portion of the market, on the order of 30%. This provides a pretty hard floor below which privately-owned housing cannot fall, because people should be reasonably able to say “this place isn’t good enough, I’ll move”.
If a property owner is willing to deal with the fact that a home’s first and foremost purpose should be to provide a safe and secure place for a person to live, then I have no problem with them profiting.
While I hate the current state of affairs around housing, some people do lose the plot and forget that some people prefer/need to rent and that rent cant just be the mortgage payment because they’re on the hook for repairs, not you.
Landlords aren’t inherently the problem, they’re a symptom of ALL property owners completely shutting down new development for over 50 years.
I agree with these ideas but we also need to fund development of new housing, and if anyone wants to complain instead of shutting it down extend an offer to buy their house so they can leave.
we also need to fund development of new housing
Hells yeah. That’s why one of the ideas above was that the government should be a significant force in housing. Part of that might be buying up existing homes, but a lot would be funding the construction of new homes.
I didn’t mention it above because while related, I considered it out of scope for that comment. But I’m also a fierce advocate for abolishing low-density zoning entirely. What my city calls “LMR” (low-medium residential) should be the bare minimum zone for residential areas. That still permits single-family separated homes to be built, but it also automatically permits 2–3 storey townhouses and apartments. Plus zoning areas near (say, within a 400 m walk of) train stations for medium-density residential. (All mixed-use, of course.)
But this isn’t !fuckcars@lemmy.world or !notjustbikes@feddit.nl, so I’ll leave it at that for now.
We also need to look at how mortgage applications are handled. Like if you can pay 3k a month in rent for 2 years (not saying 2 years should be the requirement, just that if you happen to have that history) and can prove it, you should qualify for a mortgage that costs 3k a month.
The idea that affording $3k also means you can afford a $3k mortgage falls under what I’m saying about people swinging too far in the other direction - affording $3k in rent =/= affording a $3k mortgage plus taxes/insurance plus upkeep etc etc.
That being said our credit system is 100% busted. Engaging in predatory lending to build a credit score should not be the only way to “prove” financial fitness. Just because I pay my credit cards off every month doesn’t mean I don’t still waste like $300/mo on doordash 🤣
Agree with everything but HARD disagree with #3. Pets are not a right and so many people are HORRIBLE pet owners. And when people are bad pet owners the damage they can do it unreal, like ripping the house down to the studs type of damage. Also anything that prevents people from being bad pet owners is a win in my book. That addition to the law would be AWFUL for animal welfare and it’s just not needed.
like ripping the house down to the studs
If the damage they are causing is more than superficial, that would be covered under “damaging the property” (in #1).
The point of #3 is that it shouldn’t be the landlord’s business how someone lives their life. Their only role is the fact that they own a house. If it’s bad for the animal’s welfare, that’s the State’s job to deal with, not someone purely with a profit motive.
When you write legislation you must look at the consequences of that legislation, not just the principals of the legislation. Otherwise you end up with horrible unintended side effects.
With your rules on not allowing access for inspection an animal could have an entire year to do damage before the owner could discover it. And then what? They make a claim against their insurance? Who will then try and go after the renter who probably doesn’t have the assets to pay for the damage. As a result insurance policies will increase and that cost will get passed onto innocent renters who are paying for the crappy pet owners.
Also what do you think the enforcement mechanism for this is for “The State”? How are they going to be able to look into the living conditions of these animals? There is no good way to enforce that and it will just end up with thousands and thousands of animals being neglected. You can’t just ignore the issues legislation will cause because you only care about principles. That’s just ignorant and neglectful.
the owner or an immediate family member wants to move in
Abso-fucking-lutely not. A lease is a contract. You don’t get to shove someone out into being homeless because Cousin Lou needs a place to stay. Either rent/sell the property, or keep it for personal use. Not both.
Where I live, there are two types of leases. Periodic and fixed-term. Fixed-term is where you sign a lease saying you can stay for 6 months or 12 months. Theoretically longer, but those are the normal lengths. Periodic leases are indefinite, but can be broken with some notice.
That term would not be available in the middle of fixed-term leases, only on periodic. Where I live, our state government passed laws preventing “no grounds evictions”, but they allowed a number of exceptions for what counts as “grounds”, and one of those causes is “end of fixed-term lease”. The main difference between my current state laws and the proposal above is to specifically outlaw that grounds. In fact, what’s commonplace right now where I live is that you get your 6 month lease, and at the same time you get a “notice to vacate” (an eviction notice, effectively) dated 6 months from now. And if, after 4-ish months, both you and the landlord want you to stay, they cancel the notice to vacate and get you a new lease to sign. My main intent here is to outlaw this practice.
I think allowing this use in some form is important because I’ve seen cases where it comes up. People move elsewhere for a period of time that’s long enough that it would be a bad idea (both for their personal finances and for supply of housing) to leave it empty, but not long enough that they want to sell. Think 2–5 years or so. I want to make sure that these people are as strongly incentivised to rent out their place as possible, which means removing obstacles such as “you might not be able to move back in once you return if you do rent it”.
(Also, cousins are not immediate family members.)
Ok, that makes more sense. Periodic I think would be the same as what I’ve heard called “month-to-month,” which does make sense to be a more tentative arrangement. I gotcha now.
Where i live if the owner needs the space for immediate family use, they must give three months written notice to the tenant.
Additionally the property cannot be legally rented again for three months after the tenant has moved out.
Oh, and the tenant doesn’t have to pay rent for the last of those three months. And if they move out before the end of the three months, the landlord must pay the tenant an amount equalling the rent. So if you move out after 1.5months from the notice, the landlord must pay you 1.5 months rent.
And our tenancy board, usually finds in favor of the tenants in disputes.
I live in a housing org that has a relatively flat structure and there’s no CEO at the top. Individual locations (often a whole block, not just one apartment) elect their own representatives and build their own rules. The central administration, the absolute top level, is a mere 2 hops away from the tenants and you can email them directly. It’s not perfect, and is still subject to capitalist issues like land value being inflated, but I feel like it’s alright given what we’re working with.
