A Boring Dystopia

I'm surprised so many people are running defence for landlords in the comments

As Churchill put it...

Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains — all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is affected by the labor and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of these improvements does the land monopolist contribute, and yet, by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived…The unearned increment on the land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice done.

Rent isn't theft. It's payment for a service. Whether or not that service is of value to you is a different story, but not everyone is interested in owning.

There are benefits to renting. You don't have to be financially responsible for repairs, you don't have to do maintenance or pay someone to do it for you, you have much less financial risk, and you can relocate much easier.

And not all landlords are rich people. I do agree that corporate ownership of residential property shouldn't be allowed, though.

These days it is hard to own a house, its like the system is designed to cater to the burguoise - because it is. Regular people cant have their own personal ownership because capitalist leeches known as landlords exist.

The system feeds on the profiting of others misfortunes.

Y'all are missing something imo. Landlords are artificial demand - they drive up the housing prices for everyone, including home owners.

The argument that it costs to maintain a home blah blah is BS - if it wasn't profitable then the landlords sell it. They're not being charitable. They make a profit and it comes out of poor people's wages.

Why do you think it's been made so difficult to own a home? Long as you're paying rent, you're a cash cow. Also less likely to leave a crappy job.

I do not believe that which was created through collective labor should be able to be enclosed, so that the encloser can extort others for access.

The house was not built by its owner. It was erected, decorated, and furnished by innumerable workers--in the timber yard, the brick field, and the workshop, toiling for dear life at a minimum wage.

The money spent by the owner was not the product of his own toil. It was amassed, like all other riches, by paying the workers two-thirds or only a half of what was their due.

Moreover--and it is here that the enormity of the whole proceeding becomes most glaring--the house owes its actual value to the profit which the owner can make out of it. Now, this profit results from the fact that his house is built in a town possessing bridges, quays, and fine public buildings, and affording to its inhabitants a thousand comforts and conveniences unknown in villages; a town well paved, lighted with gas, in regular communication with other towns, and itself a centre of industry, commerce, science, and art; a town which the work of twenty or thirty generations has gone to render habitable, healthy, and beautiful.

A house in certain parts of Paris may be valued at thousands of pounds sterling, not because thousands of pounds' worth of labour have been expended on that particular house, but because it is in Paris; because for centuries workmen, artists, thinkers, and men of learning and letters have contributed to make Paris what it is to-day--a centre of industry, commerce, politics, art, and science; because Paris has a past; because, thanks to literature, the names of its streets are household words in foreign countries as well as at home; because it is the fruit of eighteen centuries of toil, the work of fifty generations of the whole French nation.

Who, then, can appropriate to himself the tiniest plot of ground, or the meanest building, without committing a flagrant injustice? Who, then, has the right to sell to any bidder the smallest portion of the common heritage?

Kropotkin

I pretty much agree with this. The economy has grown up to be for parasites made by parasites. The value of work should be way higher that it currently is. The economy should work on people actually doing things rather needing to own to become prosperous.

Rent-seeking behavior is unfortunately very common.

This has come to the forefront in America since Covid and has become the reason why a lot of American's (younger Millenials and Gen Z) can't buy homes, beyond Gen Z being unable to find gainful employment (1/3 in unemployed). I think stating holes in their argument like "there are good landlords out there" or "what about this specific instance" is literally arguing against a rule with exceptions. That's not what this post is talking about. They are talking about the "corporations" who are just some rich older person or couple that are buying one, two, or three extra properties and renting them out. Frankly that's the biggest reason why housing costs have skyrocketed.

The US Federal Reserve is trying to curb this by keeping the Prime Lending Rate (PLR) high, but Trump is putting pressure on him because lowering the PLR would look good for him on paper because it would look like he did something immediate to alleviate the economic pressure we're feeling in America, directly because of him and his policies. BUT, that would be catastrophic to us "poor" (people making less that $240K/year; 90% of Americans), and I think you can see why. Yeah, if American's with large savings accounts (years ago the figure was (0% of Americans have less than $1000 in savings, so just imagine how it is now) all of a sudden saw that the mortgage on a house dropped from . . . lets just take the average cost of a "starter home" @$210K . . . $1,762.34/month to where it was prior to the pandemic at (~3%) $1,347.87, the rich Americans that were already buying those extra houses would just buy more extra houses and charge YOU, a poor American, that ~$1500/month and still charge you for any maintenance they have to do (depending on how your state renter laws are set up).

But even with all that, we still have the issue of how much houses cost. And because of the aforementioned "extra houses," we have seen a skyrocket in the cost of houses. I won't do a deep dive on it, but I will sum it up and link to a podcast you can listen to: an average home "should" cost ~$120K in today's money, but because of the MASSIVE bubble created, that home now costs ~$400K. Why? because of people buying extra homes, and those same people who don't have jobs being able to make it to zoning meetings to tell the planners they only want "big" homes in their areas to increase the selling price of their own home. That then has a cascading effect: let's say this happens somewhere in California like a suburb of San Fransico. That means that people no longer can afford to live there so they move to let's say Dallas. Now Dallas has less supply and more demand and the sellers jack up their prices arbitrarily because they want more profit. Then the buyer rents it out and keeps increasing rent prices so they can keep making more money.

This is what the X Poster is complaining about. Not an immigrant charging reasonable rent prices or "good" landlords, because the truth is, those aren't the type of people typically renting out houses to poor people who couldn't afford to buy it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bajyEFHK0M&t=1198s Here's another video that's kinda related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfsCniN7Nsc

A liberal's conclusion would be: No rent without representation.

Wait till you hear about loan interests and collateral. Maybe even covenants down the road.

By the way, tomorrow's already the fifth…