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.
Say a renter starts doing good job and money wise for themselves. They invest their surplus in investment options like mutual funds and deposits and so on. Then their surplus is enough to invest into real estate. Should they not?
Landlords provide serfdom, and they are needed because of the serfdom the worst offenders impose on society.
If you live in a house long enough you should begin to have a claim on it. Most landlords add zero value to it, they only harvest it.
If the landlords do not provide a service, you’re welcome to go to the bank to approve your loan, buy or build a house, maintain it, pay back the loan and deal with delinquent renters and sell it when it’s time for you to move out. None of which concerns you as a renter.
It is a massive PITA and it’s a so-so store of value at best. That there are assholes who charge you through the nose for the rent doesn’t mean it’s a landlord problem. It’s an asshole problem.
Bull-fucking-shit.
20 years ago, houses in my neighborhood were selling for around $50k. Those same houses today hold a current market value of over $800k.
For comparison, the value of the USD has lost roughly 40% in value over the last 20 years, meaning if the houses in my neighborhood were only a “so-so store of value” (tracking inflation) they would be worth roughly $80k today, 10x less than the current market value.
For another comparison, if you put $50k into an index fund that tracked the S&P500 20 years ago, it would be worth roughly $350k today. That’s not even half of the return houses in my neighborhood are getting over the same time period.
Sure it costs a lot of money to maintain a house and pay taxes and insurance over that 20 years and that’s going to eat into those returns. But I can guarantee you I’m paying more than that to rent a similarly-sized property, which you would be doing anyway if you didn’t have the capital to own a home.
property management and real estate firms are an affront to humanity, but i would like to point out that not all of us come to own more property than we need through greedy schemes. my parents bought a lot of real estate in the 90’s to be able to house their loved ones. my mother almost single-handedly provided housing for my grandmother, my aunts, my cousin, my step brothers, and myself even.
as they have passed on, i have either rented or sold that property to other friends and family at very reasonable prices. there is no single act that is inherently evil. there is no one size fits all label. our individual actions and intentions define us.
EDIT: just wanted to point out to the downvoter that she did this as a factory worker earning minimum wage. she was not then nor is she now rich by any metric. she still lives in a shitty neighborhood in MS. she sacrificed her luxury to help others she cared about.
EDIT 2: although i am pretty hard core leftist, i find my peers to be pretty insufferable. there is a reason that most centrists get turned off by you people. most of you would rather virtue signal than think critically.
There is a solution for landlords that we’ve known about for a long time.
And its doesn’t involve the a massive, powerful state controlling where people can live.
Its a 100% tax on the value of land. It would stop the landowning class from unfairly stealing huge amounts of money from the poor in the form of rent. It could fund the government (allowing us to decrease taxes that hurt labor, like an income tax), or be redistributed as UBI.
Seriously, if you are at all interested in potential solutions to the housing crises and wealth inequality, please, please, google Land Value Tax and Georgism.
What does this mean? It sounds like paying rent to the government using different words. A better solution I see is limiting the amount and type of property an individual can own before taxes are raised significantly or more severe steps are taken.
I live in a city where property values have increased by an order of magnitude over about 40 years.
Yes, we have a lot of speculators and wealthy landowners who need to be taxed out of existence.
But we also have a problem where seniors on fixed incomes who have owned their homes for 30 - 50 years cannot afford their property taxes because the land their homes are sitting on has exploded in value.
There is a solution to this: homestead exemption. A lot of states already implement implement this with their normal property tax. If a property is your primary residence, then the tax you pay on it cannot increase by more than x% a year. Some states also give preferential tax treatment to senior’s primary residence. Their is no reason we couldn’t implement these same breaks on a LVT.
So they wouldn’t be able to afford their taxes with a LVT, but they can’t afford their taxes under the current property tax regime (in which land value is also a factor). I don’t see how this is an argument against LVT.
But, zooming out, is it beneficial to society to have empty-nesters, and elderly single people, living in 3- or 4-bedroom houses when there’s a critical housing shortage for young families? Is it even good for them to live in a big house, when a nearby, smaller dwelling that’s cheaper, and easier to clean and keep up? The problem in the United States is that those smaller dwelling units don’t exist at all in most neighborhoods, and about the only option is to move to an “independent living” facility on the edge of town, away from family an neighbors, for $3,000 a month.
It could be a win-win: Elderly owners of high-value land could realize the cash value that’s currently locked up in their houses, while the city could benefit by intensified development of that same land, increasing nearby land values even more. We need to change the zoning code to allow building that missing-middle housing in the same neighborhoods, but if we did that, a land-value tax would help incentivize its construction.
