Does having an AirBNB setup make someone deserving of the guillotine or does that only apply to owners of multiple houses? What about apartments?
Please explain your reasoning as well.
People extorting money due to the finite nature of land, for the sole reason of having been born with better access to capital.
It’s just making money, due to having money. They didn’t invent anything, they didnt discover and invest in an emerging company. They didn’t do anything innovative or clever. Anyone born to wealth could have done it. Which is why those are, by far and away, the vast majority of landlords.
Even a Conservative, union busting aristocrat like Churchill knew how bad landlordism was and landlords have been hated throughout all of human history. It’s only the current neoliberal plague who’ve attempted to moralise it with rich people worship and bootstrap paradoxes.
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Not everyone who is a landlord is born into wealth. Someone born into poverty can also be a landlord.
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By your logic, grocery stores are the same. They don’t grow the food. They don’t invent new food. There’s nothing wrong with grocery stores either.
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The main reason landlords are hated is jealousy. People hate those who have something they don’t. Especially when landlords worked for what they have and the ones who are jealous didn’t – they want to be handed things for free without contributing. Look at the old parable of the ant and the grasshopper.
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they can but they’re so few and far between that they don’t need mentioning. Loads will claim to have been born poor too but experience has left me unable to trust those claims. I even reference the fact that its not literally all off them, so I’m not sure why you needed to mention it again.
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All landlords, I was very clear about that but people making money through simply being a middle person sucks too. Nothing close to landlords though which is why I didn’t mention them and they aren’t covered by what I said.
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Ah yes, the old “bitter or a hypocrite” trope. It has to be one or the other, as the amoral people who throw it around can’t comprehend a moral objection to exploitation, usually due to poor empathy and even poorer social skills. The only people who want something for doing no work is landlords and shareholders. Its just astral level projection from people born to wealth, who even try to moralise their explanation by claiming everyone else, not born to their privilege and opportunity, must be lazy.
It turns out, they dont care about anyone being bitter or hypothetical, let alone the morality of just about anything. They just really don’t want people talking about inequality or exploitation.
The only people who want something for doing no work is landlords and shareholders.
You are incorrect about that. Landlords absolutely do work.
Its not me who’s wrong, as owning something isn’t work.
Now, they might do some repairs or maintenance but thats actual work and not what they’re paid for.
What they’re paid for is for doing no work and they, like shareholders, are the only people who expect to be paid for doing no work.
Our society is so messed up that they even have people declaring ownership is work, on their behalf.
Being a landlord is in fact, work.
Simply owning a property is called being a real estate investor. You can invest in property without even setting foot in it.
But maintaining it, interacting with tenants, etc is all work and that’s what a landlord does. As such, people should get paid for their work.
Again, you’re wrong. “Landlord” sn’t work.
landlord
a person or organization that owns a room, building, or piece of land that someone else pays rent to use
You can’t just make up you’re own definition of words. A landlord can outsource all of that to a management company and still be a landlord.
Maintenance is work and people should be paid for work. However, the landlord will get paid regardless of who does it. Thats because “landlord” isn’t work which is why “landlording” isn’t a verb.
“Landlording” is a word. It’s the act of performing the work of a landlord.
Anyone can pay someone else to do work. But the act of hiring others and making sure they’re doing their job is still work.
The majority of landlords are known as “mom and pop” which means they only have a few rentals. Many small landlords don’t hire a large team because there’s not enough money coming in from the rental to do so.
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Is your Airbnb a spare part of your primary home, or a money making scheme that exploits housing somebody else could live in?
I am a reluctant landlord. If I had my way, I wouldn’t have any properties other people lived in, but alas there are other factors at play. I’m a renter myself, and hope to buy a house soon, but the properties that my family has dog me still.
You already own real estate, why exploit people with it when you can just live in it and stop renting?
Location, location, location.
If only it were that easy my friend.
Let me guess: you own real estate in neighborhoods you wouldn’t want to live in in hopes of extracting enough capital from your tenants so that you can buy your own home in a neighborhood you do want to live in.
You’re exploiting people poorer than you so that you can become richer.
You’re not one of the good ones…
That’s quite a lot of assumptions. And they’re all incorrect.
The bottom line. We devised a system (note, it’s not some natural system, people made this) that allows a finite resource to be claimed indefinitely.
A developer comes and builds an apt complex, then collect rent on it FOREVER. The initial value they added to housing flexibility and additional housing expires, but they value they extract does not.
As available land disappear over time (which all finite resources do when being consumed), wealth inevitably coalesces to the owners. It seems fair at first, but it ignores what makes an economy work. It allows people to not work and extract value from others over time. It is not sustainable.
You can own an entire forest just so you can enjoy a stroll by yourself, while an entire group of people are left on the outside owning nothing. If you can’t use your land and block access, you’re hurting society more than helping.
It’s somewhat like an insidious monopoly growing slowly. Rent to own as an option is a much better system.
I didn’t think about how much rent-to-own helps this situation. Current rent prices would basically expedite the process and many more would have ownership much sooner. I like this idea.
If you are engaging with housing as an investment vehicle, you are part of the reason why there is a global housing crisis.
Housing is a human right and should be legislated as such.
The reason there’s a global housing crisis is government ultimately controls the throttle on new housing development, and government always allows less than the demand.
Our supply doesn’t match our demand and the problem is getting worse as populations increase.
For example, there are countless places where an apartment building would be more profitable than a new house, but zoning density restrictions force people to either build a house or nothing.
The UK has some of the worst housing issues in Europe, yet the amount of houses (dwellings) per person has slightly increased since 2001
21,210,000÷59,113,0000=0.35 Houses per person in 2001
24,930,000÷67,350,695=0.37 Houses per person in 2021
Yet rents and house prices have absolutely skyrocketed. Supply exceeds demand, it’s just greed, long term empty investment properties and government inaction.
Sources https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/dwelling-stock-estimates-in-england-2022/dwelling-stock-estimates-england-31-march-2022 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/articles/overviewoftheukpopulation/2020#the-uks-population-continues-to-grow-but-at-a-slower-rate-than-previously
That’s really interesting, thanks.
I recently did some research on this stuff for a school project and found pretty much the same thing. Also came across Houston as an example of a city where zoning is mixed and the laws are very loose, and it seems to work itself out just fine.
It’s not just about new housing though, it’s also about fiscal policy which makes housing a more attractive investment vehicle through things like negative gearing and capital gains tax minimization than other things such as the stock market; the result is that prices are artificially inflated and you create a “renter class” who can no longer afford to buy, ever. Right now we’re financing Boomers’ retirements.
The question is, will the politicians have the political balls to fix it once the boomers have died off, or will they just let the profit roll on down through the generations, ultimately letting birth be the sole determiner of your societal class in life?
I own a flat that I rent out to people who make similar amounts of money as I do.
That allows me to take a lower paid job that allows me to do more open source work.
I agree with your second paragraph.
And coal plants provide power and heat to millions of people, that doesn’t make it right. The ends do not justify the means.
I’m renting to people who rent as a convenience, not because they can’t afford to buy a flat. I offered them decreased rent during COVID and they declined.
You are forming your opinion on a statistical anomaly worth of experiences. The reality is rent is priced fixed by very few algorithms - all of which by their nature drive the prices higher every year.
You are renting to people who choose to rent, the vast majority don’t get to choose. And even if they choose to rent, that’s because owning is too expensive in their eyes (money or time or paperwork or otherwise) - it does not mean they wouldn’t want to own if the cost was lower.
I can’t imagine anyone declining reduced costs unless phrased poorly or out of guilt.
I think the situation is different in different countries.
The assumption in your last last paragraph is very likely incorrect, I asked them outright if they wanted one and they said no, they’re software developers and warming pretty well in their cushy home office, thank you very much.
I think the scenario I described applies to most Western countries.
Congrats on having rich renters then. If they’re wealthy enough to not take reduced rent then they are likely not your countries average renter.
They’re probably not. They might be pretty average for the region though.
No no no you don’t understand you are just stealing from them even if they don’t want to buy. Everyone must have a house, there should be no landlords nor renters. /s
The electronic device you used for typing all that crap? Probably slave labour. That’s before looking at the power you wasted to do so, and it’s origin. Virtue signalling much?
Haha I would really like the thought process of the person who downvoted you. Maybe “since I’m forced to live in an immoral system, I can’t live a perfectly moral life and having a phone is OK. But going one iota beyond what I do is immoral”
IDK. I wouldn’t have posted if I wouldn’t have wanted to read people disagreeing with my assessment of the morality of what I do. But I was probably wrong to hope for a more nuanced criticism that actually tries to engage with my arguments instead of just knee-jerk downvoting.
There are a few hot topics on lemmy and this is one of them. I think you did a good thing, I found that interesting and that’s what I came to this thread for.
I dislike speculation on housing but appreciate there are many reasons why someone becomes a land lord, and I have been the person renting from someone like you when I could afford to buy. I just knew I wasn’t going to stay in that city, I was getting a good service and am happy for what I paid for. And for how carefree that period of my life was.
Tankies are not known for appreciating nuances tho.
I think it’s hard to morally judge if it’s good or not. I don’t know who would have bought it if not for me: some faceless rent extraction company who keep increasing rent at the maximum legal rate? Or (unlikely in that spot, but possible) a couple who would live there?
As it is now, there’s a couple living there. Software engineers who already said they’ll move on soonish because they think Berlin is cooler. They pay below average rent and the one time something broke, I simply sent a repair person ASAP. Not really people I feel I’m taking advantage of.
I think there can be some middle ground. Obviously speculation is pushing up both rent prices and the cost/availability of houses to buy. There are some interesting options, I like the idea to only allow residential property to be bought by physical persons - regardless of whether that’s for living in it or as an investment it would put a damper on prices sky-rocketing.
Corporations trust funds and so on can still go mad on commercial property. Offices, malls and warehouse are not a necessity and let the market decide, I think that could be a win win. Feasibility of this in various countries would obviously vary but I’m sure something can be done.
I’ve also seen suggestions aroud limiting the number of properties one can buy/own. Interesting but more complicated to enforce and IMO not needed.
So you’re not working and collecting money for it so that you have more free time to yourself that you use for your own personal interests.
You then make sure the people you rent to don’t have that free time, and raise the overall property prices by taking an available unit off the market.
Got it.
Nope, that’s very much not correct lol. I’m working. It’s just that you don’t find jobs that pay super much for open source work.
And the people renting my apartment are DINKs, they have a lot of choice about how much free time they have.
No idea about the market price thing. But I’m going to assume you got that wrong too, since the rest of your comment was baseless speculation.
That’s nice you rationalize it. The damage you’re doing is minimal, so don’t worry about the avalanche snowflake.
I understand you’re working, but you’re not working as much as the people you rent to (at a minimum to make up for the rent). They may have the means and not feel the impact, but that doesn’t change the math.
The market is based on supply and demand. You reduce supply, therefore increase demand. More demand equals higher prices.
Seeing as how you lack the basic understanding of these concepts, yet respond with arrogance, I won’t bother replying anymore.
I am working as much as the people I rent to. I’m just working a job that generates more value for the public and less value for the company than a comparable job that I could get elsewhere. Therefore they pay me less than if I would work exclusively for some company’s bottom line.
Fine, I’ll bite.
I’m one of the privileged who own a home which doubled in value over the last three years. I have enough free cash flow to buy a second or third rental property. I’ve contemplated it, and even though me and my family would be better off because of it, I refuse to.
I have friends who do so, and I’m not running to chop off their heads. People are born into this system and personally benefit from it, so they don’t question it.
The housing system is a wealth cheat code that needs reform. We’re heading towards something similar to the Chinese ghost cities where wealthy individuals use land as a bank due to the volatility of other financial instruments. Look at the occupancy rate of the numerous NYC skyscrapers that all popped up at lightning speed before this whole market was projected to inflate in value. People own these and other “investments” completely empty to hold value. Most are unrented.
It boils down to the personal freedom that wealth affords. You have more freedom to accept less compensation because you own land. You support public infrastructure, which is commendable, but you have that privilege on the backs of others. You’re not alone, and the law promotes this behavior. It’s like you’ve drilled another hole in society’s boat, but you bucket back the water to compensate. The boat is still sinking on the whole as not everyone uses their time generously.
There are other ways to add value to society that provide passive income that don’t have the same negative consequences (that we’ve identified anyway). You’re acting as a rational actor playing by the rules; those rules just happen to be broken.
Thanks for contributing to the record of public code that will benefit society. I just hope we won’t need these harmful wealth loopholes in the future to afford you (or anyone else) that comfort.
This is lemmy. You are no better than musk or bezos for doing that you filthy capitalist.
You should do you open source work hungry, naked and in the cold while someone is whipping you. Like all the virtuous 14yo tankies that are downvoting you certainly do.
/s in case it’s needed
I work in real estate, but I don’t hate landlords or rent. I hate the idea that landlording is a job somehow.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of landlords.
My landlord is an old lady who owns a series of apartment complexes. I assume she is quite wealthy, but the reason I don’t take issue with the situation is because she keeps up the property instead of paying a property management firm to do it. She also isn’t hoarding complexes or single family homes, she owns a couple, and managing a couple of complexes with a few people under you is a full time job.
The other kind is the people I work with. Fuck them. The property owners we work with are billionaires. They own hundreds or thousands of complexes and god knows how many single family homes. They also don’t do anything. They buy a complex from a builder, then they pay a property management firm to run it. All they’re doing is skimming excess rent in exchange for assuming the liability of owning the complex. Except they’re not even doing that, because everything is insured.
The first kind of people are wealthy, yes, but they work for a living. The second kind do not actually do anything. If we killed them all tomorrow and gave the complexes they own to property management firms or individual managers, nothing would change.
F*** em both. But, that’s just my opinion.
Eh renting is something that people need, and some people prefer. At least a local woman owning a couple spots keeps the money in the community instead of an out of state owner paying an out of state management firm to pay some dude peanuts to live there and actually run it or whatever.
It’s okay, if you’re bashing nice old ladies (which isn’t necessarily wrong to do) you can also swear on the internet.
I didn’t check which instance this community was on. .world mods would delete my comment or some shit for cursing.
This doesn’t seem like an open question to me.
House owning crisis incoming in USA ?
Incoming?
Next economic crisis in range I meant.
I am seeing a lot of posts regarding high rents recently.
I was speculating if this is the new domino in the line for the next economic crisis.
Someone who hords houses.
If you have an beach house that you uses every year, and rents it when it’s not using or you have one second house that you got from a deceased family member… If you need to work to maintain this second house…
That’s fine. It will not cause a inflation on the house market, it’s not just an investment.
In my city (not in US), there are a booming market of very small apartments that rich people buy just to protect their money from inflation. As result, higher prices, less units available for the general public, and the new units that are available are terrible.
We really need to make investing in property less lucrative than other means.
This is the key problem of the housing market. For generations we’ve been told the only way to wealth is home ownership - so nobody will ever support more housing because you don’t live in a house, or a neighborhood, you live in an investment and you’ve put all your retirement eggs into this single investment instead of diversifying. So, if new housing pushes value down you don’t see “Hey new neighbors” you see “there goes my retirement.”
Now, of course, institutional investors are involved and we’re just all fucked.
I mean we could start taxing capital gains as income, except no we can’t because that would never happen.
Capital gains shows up when you sell. Rental income is taxed as income. Anyone who sells a home, primary residence included, will pay capital gains on any increase in value (deprecation aside) depending on how long they’ve owned the property.
If you just go after capital gains as income, you’re also going after people’s savings and retirement accounts. Not good.
So yeah, people pay taxes on income from and selling a rental.
You’re not going to get what you want by going this direction, and it’s not a good idea.
You need to prevent corporate ownership of and squatting on residential properties. These giant corps create artificial scarcity and fix rent prices, and because they’re corporations, can avoid much of the taxation you and I see. That’s the real issue. Not some guy who owns a couple houses and rents one out.
If you just go after capital gains as income, you’re also going after people’s savings and retirement accounts. Not good.
Unless you just make the tax progressive, like any sane system. It can start at 0 for the average retirement savings amount of capital gains and just go up once you start reaching crazy amounts of wealth
If only there was a single chance in hell of making it happen, yeah.
Capital gains IS progressive. Short term capital gains are taxed as ordinary income. Long term capital gains are taxed according to income bracket and range from 0% to 20%. This year to qualify for the 0% tax bracket a single person would have to make less than approximately $47k. Hardly rich.
I would be interested to see data on how much capital gains tax is paid by people in whichever (income) tax bracket, or how people’s proportion of income tax vs capital gains tax lines up.
Savings interest and such is already taxed as income, no?
Hitting retirement accounts would make investing enough to retire harder, but tax brackets could be set so as to limit this effect (which, again, wouldn’t happen) while still capturing an awful lot of real estate sale income. Almost any house in my city has gone up by enough to immediately put you in upper-middle-class range for your income by itself if you bought it even just a handful of years ago, so selling/trading/working in addition to that would tax the sale significantly.
I get that there would be a burden to “common folk” but I would really love to see how much, compared to closing the easy out for richer folk.
Do you own a residential home for a purpose other than you or your family living in it? You’re a landlord.
My parents rent out a room to a traveling nurse since my brothers and I moved out, the space was just going to waste. I’m not positive on what she pays, but I think it’s around $500.
My parents and grandparents own rent houses. They’re active property managers. Most fixes they do themselves. My summers growing up were working on them.
I think the difference between what they do and the corporate owned apartment I’m staying in is the “personal touch” (for lack of a better term). When the owners have never even seen the property, they see renters as numbers on paper instead of people.
I do not think having an AirBNB or any BNB counts, as those are temporary arrangements similar to a hotel. They can also make good use of a property that normally would not be in use. One of my friends is a musician, she lives half of the time in Nashville, because recording studios and producers, and half of her time in Montana where she’s from. Whatever house she’s not living in at the time gets rented out as an AirBNB. I would consider that acceptable, she’s actually using both places, and when she’s not in one, she’s putting it to good use.
In my eyes a landlord is someone who sits on a property, maybe maintains it, maybe not, and makes someone else pay their bills.
I’m lucky enough to own my own place, but one of my coworkers is paying what I pay for my mortgage in rent every month, and he has less space than I do. What is his landlord doing to get a $1800 check every month? Absolutely nothing. That’s not OK. At least apartment buildings typically have amenities. Don’t get me wrong I’m still not a fan of apartment buildings, but they can be done right, they just usually aren’t.
It’s deeply immoral because not only is it landlording but it’s also gig economy so you have all that baggage thrown in as well.
Air BNB counts as landlording. Charging 100 a night instead of 1200 a month is scummy.
I personally put it in the same category as a hotel. It is a necessary service for people who are traveling and need a place to sleep and relax for a week or two. Definitely not a long term thing. That is what differentiates AirBNB from renting, is you don’t expect to live at an AirBNB.
If you are owning houses just to use them as AIRBNBs, yes. Profiting off of artificial scarcity and already having money is bad. Being wealthy doesn’t mean you deserve to be more wealthy.
Landlords aren’t profiting off of scarcity. They’re profiting off of having the means to do something that renters won’t: Buy a house with a 30yr mortgage, and leverage that money for something useful.
You too can buy a house. But everyone who shits on landlords, always spits out excuses why buying a house isn’t “feasible” or would “lock them down too much”, etc etc.
If you can buy 30k worth of tractor equipment, you can run it and make the money back you spent on it. That’s all landlords are doing - they’re buying when you won’t (not can’t…won’t) and then selling it back to you in trade for your “economic freedom” to move every 1-2 years and bitch about it.
Then we have the whole “fuckcars” movement, who wants everyone crammed into a shared-wall sardine can and nobody to own a house of their own ever; for the sake of population density so they can bike everywhere.
Living in a house share 4 years ago giving my god awful landlord over half my paycheck from full time employment as a cafe manager meant I was unable to save.
Your out of touch
Not everyone can buy a house, because of greedy people using housing as a driver of profits. There are a growing mass of people out there that will simply never make enough to own a property where they live. For some people, renting is not a choice - its the only option.
Also: you are completely and utterly missing the entire point of c/fuckcars.
Ya, seriously, their take is crazy. I’m a two income household, both software engineers, and to save enough money to afford the loan to buy the home would take us years. The cost of a mortgage right now is higher than my rent by a huge percentage and that still requires 20-30k of down payment.
Could we downsize to a 1 bedroom apartment, eat PBJs every night, and stick to cheap hobbies such that we could afford to start the loan in two years or something - yes. But why am I required to trade my youth for the ability to pay the bank the better part of a million dollars over the next 20 years of my life just so I can install a nice bathroom and AC and maintain the flat properly.
Then we have the whole “fuckcars” movement, who wants everyone crammed into a shared-wall sardine can and nobody to own a house of their own ever; for the sake of population density so they can bike everywhere.
Lol what?
I’m pro fuckcars despite the fact that I know they have a place.
It has nothing at all to do with not owning a house or a home. As well, not everyone has to live in the city. But cities should be made with people in mind and the infrastructure should be there for people to get around cities without the need for everyone to own a car.
Besides. Less car-centric design also means less traffic!
You can show the bank that you’ve never missed a rent payment, yet still be unable to get a mortgage whose monthly payments are less than rent because you don’t have enough saved for a downpayment. That’s a “can’t”, not a “won’t”.
We had a solution to this problem and the banks went and fucked it up and with it our economy.
What miserable view of the world you have…
I’m lucky enough to have been financially able to buy a home. I had help making the down payment, but we’ve now got a 30 year mortgage. My monthly payments are less than what I was paying for rent, less than the average rent in the city by almost a third. I got this place with two above-average incomes, and had the good fortune to get it during the COVID housing and interest rate dip, and I still needed extra help.
If someone is stuck with renting, they’re likely paying more than they would for a mortgage. They can’t save up the money because they’re already lagging behind, and the housing market isn’t coming down in price, and wages absolutely aren’t keeping pace. No one is saying a house would “lock them down,” they’re pointing out they can never afford it because they can’t even come up with the money to show the bank they can save because they’re already paying above the potential mortgage payments every month.
But you’re saying they won’t, not can’t, so what should they do to come up with the money? Start selling kidneys? 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and that same link shows 71% have less than $2000 in their savings. So where exactly are people supposed to shit out your hypothetical $30,000?
Fellow home-owner, not a landlord. Not in the US but I think things are comparable.
Your mortgage repayments are less than what you were paying in rent, okay. However, do you feel that is a reasonable comparison?
Do you pay some sort of insurance? Property and or council taxes, rubbish removal, water and other things that you probably didn’t even know existed before becoming a home owner?
Do you know that your roof has and average life span of 30 years? Unless yours is new, you’ll need to start thinking about it at some point, and it can be pricey, together with all the rest of planned and unplanned maintenance that comes with owning a place.
Not really defending everything the person you are replying to said, but I think this topic too often gets simplified to monthly rent vs monthly mortgage repayments.
Even with the added costs of owning the home and upkeep, it’s only equivalent or just above rent, and that’s with the condo association fees and insurance. Even while renting I was stuck paying for utilities. And I’m highly aware that the roof needs replacing, given that we’ve got to replace ours within 5 years.
But if your point is “owning a home is more expensive than renting when you factor in all extra costs,” I want to again point out that most people are barely able to stay afloat. His point was that anyone can buy a house. Mine is that the money he thinks grows on trees literally does not exist for the majority of people.
Fair enough, my point was more that people that just assume that mortgage payment is X and is less than rent therefore I’m am being robbed aren’t looking at the whole picture, or aren’t being honest.
Except the mortgage payment ends after 30 years, and what you pay into the house is yours afterwards. Sure, the insurance and other taxes continue - but once the house is paid off, it’s done. I paid my mortgage off in 5 years by dumping every last dime I had into it and living off of nothing but scraps.
Rent has to account for all of that too, plus labour costs and profit for the landlord. Unless the landlord is charitably handing out free money, there’s no world in which owning is more expensive than renting on average for an equivalent property.
always spits out excuses why buying a house isn’t “feasible” or would “lock them down too much”, etc etc.
Like not being a POS?
Does having an airbnb bikeshed get the guillotine?
Landlords are landlords. Rather than simply guillotine landlords forever, it’s better to have publicly owned housing. It’s not really a gray area, the system itself is fucked and should be abolished, but exists precisely because publicly owned housing isn’t widespread yet.
Doesn’t having publicly owned housing make the state a landlord effectively?
It can, but not necessarily. The issue with landlords is rent-seeking, if the state funnels all of the income towards maintenance, building new housing, or even lowering housing prices without taking profit, they have removed all issues with landlords.
As a landlord, their goal is to make profit. As a state, their goal is to provide a service.
You have a lot more faith in the government than I do
In a bourgois government? I probably have less faith, but one controlled democratically by the Workers? Far more than any landlord.
