I had a good landlord, so they’re definitely out there. Mine didn’t raise my rent more than $50 in a decade of living there, and was pretty great and quick about repairs. I am sorry others have had the experience they’ve had, and I think it’s more to do with private equity buying real estate, or some kind of landlord with 10+ units etc. I think the mom/pop landlord with the odd house they rent out when their family isn’t using it are pretty chill. I am sure there are examples to prove me wrong though
You’re right, there are good examples out there. The point is they’re statistical anomalies not the rule. Landlords by and large serve very little societal purpose.
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When a house is an investment that grows in value society attempts to maximize scarcity, fewer houses or higher demand means more growth in their value. But imagine we lived in a society where we had more houses than we need, a surplus, because we valued housing people whenever they needed housing and we knew roughly how many houses we needed to do that.
You could move anywhere and find a house to own at a cost you could afford. Imagine housing wasn’t a massive store of value such that multiple bureaucratic steps were created to nickle and dime the transaction. Buying a home could be easy.
You could find a vacant house or one that has leaving owners, inspection papers were regulated and up to date, you could buy it off of them using your money or a loan from the government, and you could move in just like if you were renting.
You don’t have to save up for money to buy a home in a society where housing people is a priority. Housing would be cheaper, cost of living would be lower, purchasing power would be higher, and we could have methods in place for transitioning ownership without requiring a lump sum of cash cause no one’s expecting a massive windfall immediately. Ya know, loans.
Living on the street would be a fictional concept, encouraging homelessness is a societal choice - we could house everyone on the streets within the year if we wanted to. Does that mean long term hotels wouldn’t exist? No. That’s an actual service being provided.
I’m just saying, if landlords served a purpose we could enable that service as a society but if housing wasn’t an investment vehicle it’s pretty clear the number of landlords would plummet over night and we’d quickly realize relatively few people liked the “service” they were receiving.
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If people actually followed the teachings of Jesus, it would be a very difficult world. Christianity is supposed to be socialist as fuck.
It wouldn’t be difficult at all. In fact it would be a true utopia.
Problem is gods aren’t real and human instincts prefer selfishness and tribalism over “socialist” ideas.
Humans love the idea of socialism until it comes down to “us vs them” then socialism is the greatest threat there is.
That’s not true. You’d have to gauge your eyes out for lusting after a woman. And women? They aren’t allowed to reject their husband’s sexual advances. Which doesn’t sound extreme until it turns out hes got a scat fetish.
The first part of your argument kinda supports mine.
Jesus said if you can’t quit staring at, or keep your fuckin hands off women, cause you’re so pathetic about attractive women, gouge your eyes out and cut off your hands. Cause you’re the problem.
As for the second part was that something Jesus himself preached? Or is that more of that Paul dudes bullshit?
I don’t care who wrote that down. None of it was written by jezus anyway.
People think the oxymoron is between ‘Good Christian’ and ‘Landlord’.
When it is in fact between ‘Good’ and ‘Christian’.
This is ridiculous. There are a lot of sanctimonious fundamentalists in the world, and there are a lot of genuinely good people who identify as Christian. Some of the best people I know are Christians. They’re not inherently hateful bigots, in fact I’d wager those are a loud minority.
There are good people who are Christian, sure. But they’re only good people because they are bad Christians. They (their denomination) have cherry picked the least contentious passages and ignored the most hateful.
A ‘Good Christian’ is a creature of bigotry and contradiction, who spares no bias for which passages are morally good or bad. In some sense, The Westborough Baptist Church embrace many of the worst aspects of Christianity, they are Good Christians (but bad people).
This is nonsense. The bad people who call themselves Christians are the ones cherry picking bigotry. The Christian message is, fundamentally, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:30-31). There are a lot of hateful bigots who put a cross on the building, and those are the loud minority. A good Christian is one who prays quietly alone at home, not shoving their religion in other people’s faces (Matthew 5:6).
Westboro Baptists are bad Christians, as are any others who spew hate and intolerance against others.
1 Timothy 2:12: I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.
Okay. When I say “Christian” I’m referring to followers of the teachings of Jesus. Lots of people have a lot of commentary about a lot of things. One of those people was Paul, who wasn’t a disciple and never met Jesus. Timothy is, purportedly, Paul’s correspondence with some guy named Timothy. There are many who feel that Paul seriously corrupted the original Christian message.
Forgive me if I don’t consider the Pauline epistles to be representative of the core Christian message.
Lol here we go with the moving of goal posts.
Pack it up guys, our work here is done.
You can’t be a good anything and be a landlord. At least if we use the moral meaning of “good”.
You could only ask for as much rent as you need to cover the expenses for whatever you’re renting out.
The issue with that is that you’re still making money on a human right. That property is gonna gain value and eventually you’ll be able to sell it for more than you bought it for, all on the back of the tenants. Unless you’re planning to give the tenants the house when they pay the value of it but at that point there’s no reason for you the own it to begin with.
I’m confused. Are you saying people shouldn’t have to pay for housing? For food? For electricity?
They’re providing/enabling the human right. Why do you describe it as if they were making money off of necessity without trade and giving?
They’re providing/enabling the human right.
You are literally saying that your human rights should be privately owned by somebody else. If that’s the case, why even bother with human rights?
You gotta separate the concept of a right from fulfilling them.
You can have a human right. But that alone does not answer how it is fulfilled.
The right is not owned. It can’t be.
My landlord didn’t pay for nor make the land my place is on. Nor the place I reside on. Yet he jacks up the rent every march as soon as he can, as much as he legally can.
My landlord doesn’t clean the lots, doesn’t clean the public bathrooms, doesn’t do anything but come on by to complain about the lots he doesn’t improve.
How he is providing anything but less money in my family’s bank account, and an headache to everyone he complains to?
I’m saying landlords are parasites and there’s no way to excuse what they do as a good thing or necessary.
Yes. I would say people shouldn’t have to pay for the basic necessities required to live. Why should anyone live with the threat of homelessness and starvation?
Because it takes time and resources and create and maintain housing… who will pay for it, and why is it the landlord’s fault instead of whoever isn’t taking that responsibility (government???).
Okay, but why do we need the landlord then? We’d just need a custodian.
Because you can’t afford to buy a property? So you need someone else to do it for you and then pay them a service fee for living in their property.
There’s a lot of smaller victories to win before we can have the big victory of outlawing landlords, so we should fight those first imo.
I am not a landlord. Yet.
When i do buy a 2nd property I do intend to rent it out at a reasonable price - and I have no guilt over doing so because all of our country’s private property is being bought up by foreign “investors” driving up the cost of ownership and rents while leaving properties unoccupied. It’s disgusting and I’ll fight it directly when I can afford to.
I’m not completely against the concept of renting. But imo the property should be owned either by the inhabitant of it, or the state. And then the state employs a custodian in charge of repairs and administration (you know, the only useful aspects of a landlord), while renting it out for a low price. And in order to keep prices a s low as possible, maintenance is supplemented by a tax.
The problem with private landlords of one or two extra properties, while they’re often not morally bankrupt, is that they tend to be wholly inept at the custodian part. Plus, if properties are all owned in small numbers rather than organized on the large scale, that’s just very inefficient.
That does sound like it would be of benefit but I’m not sure how realistic it is to set up a system like this and it work for everyone - would the government just start buying property off people? Would that crash or balloon the market? How do you ensure that families aren’t priced out of moving home either by higher property prices (from the government buying up everything) or from a catastrophic crash caused by no one wanting to buy property as investments?
Also how would the government provide attractive housing options across the economic spectrum across the whole of the country? Sounds like a monstrously large government department would need to be formed, which amongst other things would be very inefficient and goes against the objectives of the government. Take for example state health care- there is only one tier of care, and if you want anything better you pay for it privately. If we had the same for housing but didn’t have the private option then in all liklihood the government would be thrown out and the next one would be the one who promises private housing. Because like it or not, the middle class doesn’t want to live like the working class.
As I said, there a lot of battles to win and I think this anti-landlord stuff is just short sighted because there is no realistic solution that could be implemented today even if a country was willing - which it isn’t. Instead we should focus on fighting the smaller fights that would lead us towards the utopia: rent control, taxation, foreign “investors”, empty dwellings, single-family properties etc…all of these things could be vastly improved today for the benefit of everyone except those leaching on society.
You could still have different prices, albeit lower ones. Renting then becomes part of a resources allocation game. If you want a bigger/more luxurious home, you pay more and have less for other things. If a fancy house isn’t so important to you, you can get a cheaper one and have more money left for vacations, fine dining, cinema, etc.
As for the efficiency, that government department could take lessons from big property owners and organize like them, only with state subsidies and without profit goals. That way, the middle class, by virtue of having more money, could still afford better housing. Also, I don’t want the middle class to live like the working class, I want the working class to live like the middle class. Also also, there’s no “middle class”, only parts of the working class that got lucky. But they’re fundamentally still beholden to their employers’ whims.
Incremental change withing the current system is good and important, but we nonetheless have to discuss the big break that has to occur at some point, and what comes after. Incremental change can only take us so far.
