ID: A Sophie Labelle 4 panel comic featuring Stephie in different poses, saying:
Landlords do not provide housing.
They buy and Hold more space than they need for themselves.
Then, they create a false scarcity and profit off of it.
What they’re doing is literally the opposite of providing housing.
When I say need, I’m talking about hard needs. Food, shelter, medical care, etc.
I don’t consider any of the things that you list as a need (yes, a person may need those things in the moment, but they are not human needs. Those are where the moral argument, for me, comes into play)
But you are right, capitalism is essentially the interaction between a buyers demand for something and an owners supply.
Those are human needs, sure - but those things still take resources to make. Take away all of civilization, and everyone since the dawn of time has had to put in effort to be able to attain those things. I agree with, and understand the need to ensure that housing is affordable – but I don’t think scapegoating landlords is the way to go about doing it. It’s the same thing the right does with blaming immigrants for takin’ der jerrbs.
I’d much rather blame the government for not putting guardrails on the practice, or not spending our tax dollars in making affordable housing. If we can have HOAs, surely we can get the government to build housing, and sell it to single-families with stipulations that ownership can only ever be put in a single-family’s name, etc. That would drive down demand, also driving down prices.
That’s the whole deal with abortions now too - LINE MUST GO UP!! – they don’t care about children, they care about making line go up. If line keeps going up though, things are unaffordable.
Hell, remember $15/hr min wage? If we carried that with inflation, everyone would be making $25/hr MINIMUM today. If everyone was making $25/hr minimum, houses would look a lot more affordable to us. There’s a whole plethora of abuses we need to be tackling.
Its true that shelter, food, and health require some level of labor, but I don’t think that justifies small numbers of individuals controlling the means of producing those things or the ownership of the things, themselves, and then withholding them from others unless they are compensated. I don’t think its true that everyone has to put in effort to attain these things – I mean look at the very young and the very old! They shouldnt have to be put to work in order to be housed, clothed, fed, cured. I’d argue, in fact, the exact opposite of what you said – that humans have collectively worked together since the dawn of time to ensure children and elderly are taken care of, and people are fed, clothed, sheltered, etc. and in many cases, those societies had no concept of ownership or money, at all.
I do take a bit of umbrage with your wording about scapegoating landlords and comparing them to immigrants. I’d be really hesitant to compare those who have a high amount of power with those who have almost no power, at all. Scapegoating would imply that landlords do no damage to renters, when they in fact extract wealth from them for the enrichment of the landlord, while also wielding power over them in the form of eviction.
We are talking on two different planes, though, so I do understand where you’re coming from. I think you’re looking at things from a very practical and real-world standpoint, whereas I’m thinking more in theoretical, or maybe philosophical sense. I don’t think we agree ultimately but I appreciate you taking the time to write that
I guess part of my viewpoint stems from my mother starting off as a real-estate agent when I was a child - having a stroke at 32, and being unable to truly work. By racking up credit card debt, she was able to build a house and start renting it - it was a lot of work and she took a lot of risk in doing so. She rented it out in order to sustain our family - and eventually ended up giving it to my sister. You’d be surprised at how much power renters have over a house, and the difficulty in actually “extracting” anything from them. Over the years that house was destroyed by tenant after tenant, with basically no way for us to recover funds from them for the damages.
Renters can drag out the eviction process for a good 8+ months or longer, dodging service, etc. Then they live in your property and destroy it before they leave - with the landlord holding the short end of the stick. It’s not all butterflies and daisies.
On top of that, because she owned a rental, our family was ineligible for any kind of assistance programs - no food stamps, no childcare credits, etc.
Corporate landlords, are the ones who gobble up massive swaths of housing and raise prices. But landlords is a pretty broad brush to paint with, and I’ve seen the flip side of this coin.
Landlords themselves have taken some risk, or used their own savings to be able to build a house that ends up giving someone the ability to ‘digital nomad’ like they want. It’s a service in trade for money, like everything else. If it weren’t a service that someone wanted, they’d just buy a house. Many states have first time homebuyers programs, and there are still some very affordable homes that can be had on a somewhat meager wage. But - the catch with that is that you’ve gotta be willing to live below your standards for a while. That’s how I ended up in my home. Well and septic were fucked, didn’t have a kitchen, half the walls weren’t even there – And I bought it because it was still a house. Over 15 years or so I’ve put money into it here and there, and now it’s worth a lot. But I put a lot of work into it too. I basically lived in a garbage heap for the first 2 years. About 8 years ago, I got cancer. It’s difficult to work now after all the treatments. If I wanted to go take a risk and rent this out - after I did all of that work, why would that make me a bad person for wanting something I could live off of?
The renter loses a lot of the risk by renting. I take on the risk and the house provides someone with a place to live. I’ve gotta find a price to put on that to guard against a bad renter, repairs, etc.
