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.
Rent-seeking behavior is unfortunately very common.
But money earned in labor can be converted into property, you see.
You can’t decide that YOUR labor money is more valuable than MY labor money. Maybe you spent your labor money on prostitutes. Maybe you spent your labor money donating to churches.
It doesn’t matter. I spent MY labor money on property.
You are totally right. I was going to buy several properties, but I chose prostitutes instead.
My bad.
See you are purposely ignoring the various entry barriers to property ownership.
- Not living paycheck to paycheck
- Having the down payment (or parents that can help you with that)
- Having the right credit score
- etc…
Instead you think people don’t own property cause they spend their money wrong, for example in prostitutes?
Get out of you echo chamber, I get is cosy and safe there but come on…
By the way, tomorrow’s already the fifth…
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.
With all due respect, I can’t agree with this. It’s theft when a multi billion company buys home properties and then rents and manipulates the market. If someone buys a house and succeeds into buying himself another studio apartment for future kids and in the meanwhile rents it, that’s not theft, pal.
What if the rent is fair and the property owner is not a profiteering corporation? What if I just moved to a bigger house and want to rent the old one to someone who doesn’t want to own one?
Am I stealing from someone?
What if you put your hand upon my hip, when you dip, I dip, we dip?
What if I’ve got a girl named Rama Lama, Rama Lama Ding Dong?
How about oo-ee-oo-ah-ah-ting-tang-walla-walla-bing-bang?
What then?
Valid point.
Hey man, we can’t have reasonable normal discourse in here.
Everything has to be vastly oversimplified and moralized into a hyperbolic statements measure against some ideal utopia society.
But the current system is broken and it can never be fixed and the only alternative is Star Trek utopian society.
do they murder and kill all the conservatives, moderates, and white people in Star Trek?
last time i saw it all the captains were white guys…
Most of the people that I have rented from have been pretty kind, decent folks. I lived in one apartment building, that definitely sucked, and one 3 level that was section 8 besides us, and that landlord was on the scummy side, but didn’t argue about fixing things. Other than that, just people renting their first house that was too small after a point and they bought another. And I bought my house from the last one 40k under market because we were good tenants and had become friends.
Are the people that sold me their extra house 40k off evil?
Exactly. You rent a house? You are the equivalent of Jeff Bezos!
well it wasn’t really a 40K discount if that transaction didn’t require real estate agents, it might have actaully netted them more money.
but your case is extremely rare. most people are bidding on the open market and don’t have that kind of luck. I’ve also been very lucky with renting, buying, and renting out my bedroom of the place i owned. but most people aren’t as lucky or as shrewd as i am.
There are bad people all around. Bad landlords, bad sellers, bad owners, bad renters, and there are criminal ones as well.
But the truth is most people are somewhere in the middle, they will have some good and bad experiences, some good and bad luck.
It’s hard to grasp this when your mentality is coming from a lifetime of capitalist propaganda, but yes, you’re stealing from someone.
Imagine a perfect world, where spacious modem homes are constructed in a responsible manner, and where anyone can live anywhere that’s available. No rent, no mortgage, no housing payments at all; housing as a right, funded by the public, and you live in a unit that suits your family in an area close to your workplace.
Now, we don’t live in this perfect world, but to complete the vision just to rule out common talking points: In this perfect world, the housing units are modern and spacious, since they aren’t produced by corporations for profit, there is no pressure to cut corners and no incentive to deliberately keep housing scarce. Construction is planned around need instead of return on investment: durable materials, good insulation, safe wiring, accessible design, decent sunlight, green space, and maintenance that’s done because people live there, not because a spreadsheet says it’s “worth it.” Neighborhoods aren’t carved up by speculation, and empty units aren’t treated like “assets” to hoard; if something sits vacant, it’s because it’s being repaired or repurposed, not because someone is waiting for the market to rise.
And here’s the part that matters for your question: in that world, you moving to a bigger home doesn’t create a private opportunity to extract money from someone else. It just means a smaller unit becomes available to someone who needs it, at no cost, because shelter isn’t a commodity.
But in this world, housing is artificially turned into a revenue stream. When you move up and keep the smaller place as a rental, you’re not “providing housing” the way a builder or a maintenance crew provides housing, you’re controlling access to something people must have to survive and charging them for permission to exist there.
The “fair price” argument only works if the market itself is fair. It isn’t. It’s shaped by scarcity, wage stagnation, barriers to ownership, and the simple fact that people can’t “opt out” of needing a home.
So yes: the theft isn’t that you’re charging above some moral ceiling, like you’d be fine if you just found the perfect number. The theft is the extraction itself, taking a cut from someone’s paycheck not because you produced their home, but because you happen to hold the deed while they have no real alternative. They pay, not out of freely chosen exchange, but because the alternative is displacement, overcrowding, or homelessness. That’s coercion dressed up as consent.
If you want a concrete way to think about it: imagine any other necessity, e.g., water, insulin, oxygen. If you had extra and someone needed it, charging them monthly for access because “that’s what the going rate is” would still feel like exploitation, even if you charged less than your neighbor. Housing is just as necessary; we’ve just been trained to treat the tollbooth as normal.
And to be clear, I’m not saying you’re uniquely evil, or that you invented the system. I’m saying the system makes it easy to feel innocent while benefiting from harm. The moral question isn’t “am I kinder than other landlords?” It’s “am I participating in a structure that turns someone’s need into my income?” If the answer is yes, then whatever the price, you’re taking something that should never have been up for sale in the first place.
The solution doesn’t come from small guys like you giving up their rental properties, because we know the corporations won’t give up theirs. The solution would be a move to that more perfect world, which forces both corporations and small landlords like yourself to give it all up at once.
I don’t blame you for trying to find a way out of the wave slavery situation we all face, but you’re trying to get out of it by becoming part of the problem. The problem is capitalism.
Lol ok
What part of what I said did you find humorous?
Edit: Oh, you’re offended that I said your rental property would be taken away from you, your opportunity to oppress someone else and have a small slice of the pie. If you could own an apartment building, you would, and you’d call yourself a little guy and not as bad as the big corporations.
Don’t worry though, when we take away your property and right to oppress others, we’ll guarantee you a nice living arrangement that you don’t have to pay for either.
They’re just a troll. I recommend reporting and judicious heckling.
Dude, I was laughing at the fact that you typed all that out. I didn’t even read it. It’s a stupid online forum. Go out that energy into more important things.
Eh, I’m sick and I’m bed. Really hoped I’d get you thinking and reflecting instead of shutting down, capitalism is ruining our kids’ futures and destroying our planet, it’s a very important thing.
I haven’t seen this much angsty preteen energy in a comment since being on Reddit. Do your parents know you’re on Lemmy?
Hahah good one
perfect worlds don’t exist.
people in them would have to be perfect, they wouldn’t be people.
maybe you could have such a society if it were made of precisely programed robots, but people aren’t like that. They have this thing called free will.
you too, in this very post, are trying to profit and win by convincing others to believe what you believe. you want to score points just like everyone else.
it’s almost as if capitalism isn’t some ‘system’ it’s just a product of human competition for power and influence…
What is a fair rent?
Why do you even use the word fair in an economic context?
A price that isn’t gouged?
What is a gouged price? This looks like it will be a circular argument.
There is no fair price. https://dhspriory.org/kenny/PhilTexts/Marx/German/me19_247.htm
What is a circular argument?
I just used your debate tactic against you. Just keep asking people to define things and you’ll never have to make a point. It’s that easy.
a gouged price is a price that exceeds the fair market value, due to a short term scarcity or other circumstance, that typically can’t be changed under normal circumstances.
but i’m guessing you don’t want a clear definition?
a fair market price is a price set under normal market conditions of supply and demand. Where I live a fair market rent for a 1 bedroom apartment is 3,000. Maybe people find that unfair because they can’t afford it. I can and I find it fair, and the vacancy rate in my city is below 1%, so 99% of people here also find that fair.
lots of people love to complain that is too much, but they are still willing to pay it. during the pandemic rents dropped a lot, due to a lack of demand and places were going for $2,000. but once it was over they went right back up again and even higher than they were before. were the landlord being ‘gouged’ by low rents when they couldn’t find anyone to rent their units in 2020-2021? or are they only gouging now that demand is high again and they can get 3.5K for one bedroom?
fair
market value
Choose one
Removed by mod
@zedgeist How about rent of things, as opposed to rent of living space? I’m specifically thinking of the hardware I’m renting for this Fediverse server. A network connection, power, and cooling come with it. In my view this is more acceptable than having to rent a house or car. (Related topic: is having a car moral? Related to that: Is there a moral argument to be made for our against living away from a population center? And related to that: why the Hell do people refuse to wear masks during a pandemic?)
Is my renting that hardware more paying for a service than straight rent? There’s certainly the aspect of my not being able to afford the hardware cost up-front and just renting space, network, and power.
Ideally I’d just run the server in my cellar, but I live in the woods and trees fall on the power lines all too often. (Loop to the question of the morality of living away from population centers.)
Rent is theft? I thought rent empowered people. How is it theft for a car rental company to rent you a car at at an airport? How is it theft for uhaul to rent you extra storage space when you need it?
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.
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.
Indeed. The system is currently set up to prevent people who aren’t already earning rent from acquiring property to earn rent.
instead of encouraging citizens to buy one property to rent it out…at a reasonable price, perhaps…and have a relationship with their tenant…our system punishes small owners or people trying to enter the market and rewards those who already have the wealth.
I’m very lucky to have my own house. The number of spam calls I get from randos trying to buy houses is staggering. Some are obviously from call centers. I don’t understand how it makes financial sense to pay people to cold call every fucking homeowner in the US constantly in the hopes that they catch someone looking to sell quickly (and cheaply?). WTF is their endgame?
I kinda want to get everyone on board with refusing to sell single family houses to anyone who isn’t going to live there as their primary residence. Back in the not so old days, people would refuse to sell to “undesirables” because they didn’t want to tank property values, which would also carry significant reputational harm. We need to use that energy for good.
In theory, developers who would replace single family houses with multiple houses, townhomes or condos would be OK. We do need more housing in general. Although, IDK if real estate developers are a trustworthy bunch.
In theory, developers who would replace single family houses with multiple houses, townhomes or condos would be OK. We do need more housing in general. Although, IDK if real estate developers are a trustworthy bunch.
Trustworthiness of developers is a moot point because exclusionary zoning laws prohibit that replacement in the vast majority of urban areas anyway.
That’s what so many people in this thread don’t get: the law, designed to give even more privilege to already-privileged single-family homeowners, creates literal housing shortages (in the places people actually want to live, because housing is not fungible between locations), and then they somehow confuse that government mandated distortion of supply vs. demand as “capitalism.” They keep blaming “foreign investors” and other scapegoats, but they’re not the real cause of the problem.
Or more like we let companies own private homes and that fucked the market together with Airbnb
I can agree with some arguments about the rental market, or laws about rent protection / rights. But rent in itself is not theft. Somebody wanting to live in somebody else’s property whether it’s for the night, a week or a year has to pay for it, or go buy their own place to stay in.
Kids back in my day you used to be able to rent a house for like $400. It was much cheaper than owning a house and had several advantages. Sometime after 2012 that all changed. Now it’s as you said. There’s a place for rent and land lords, it’s just not the current system
Wait till you hear about loan interests and collateral. Maybe even covenants down the road.
