Have Life-or-Death duels for any CEO or landlord wishing to raise their total pay or rent. If they win, tax them at 90% income. If they lose they will die.
The real solution is that new housing permits cannot be granted until a certain threshold of low income housing is met. For instance, if 3% of the rental market is low income housing, and the city ordinance requires 15%, no new multi-unit housing construction permits are granted until the minimum threshold of 15% is met. Don't let them build their "luxury" condos until the needs of the city are met. Unfortunately, money talks, and right now the people building the condos have a lot of it.
Well... yes! Think about it: you're homeless (and freezing and exposed to all sorts of vermin, insects, pig harassment and social parasites) ergo you're a criminal.
-OR-
You're squatting (and not freezing and not exposed to all sorts of vermin, insects, pig harassment and social parasites) ergo you're a criminal.
Then add to that the innate laziness, fecklessness and sloth of the pigs.
pigs can round up un-housed people on the street relatively easily with sweeps and panel vans to transport to a more profitable form of existence: jails run by ex-pig investors and over-billing the local, regional and national governments for the "service" they provide. Now factor in these people are squatting and the pigs actually have to work to do their filthy little jobs.
Work? pigs? Say it ain't so, Joe!! IMHO this is the best strategy to (1) house the un-housed and (2) show the pigs to be the worthless societal parasites that they are.
In a market with expensive housing, that would have effects similar to simply making renting illegal: a dramatic drop in property values, conversion of multi-unit rental properties into condos, and no apartments available for rent anywhere that isn't a slum. I suppose it would be good for home-buyers, since people owning (former) rental properties would be desperate to sell, but it wouldn't be good for renters.
It wouldn't take lots of money of there were no landlords. The average home takes only 300 labor hours to build. Homes are expensive because of the rent can pull in, not because they're expensive to build.
Forced labor is not exclusive to private prisons. Federal and many state prisons force inmates to work for little or no compensation as well.
Today, more than 76 percent of incarcerated workers surveyed by the Bureau of Justice Statistics say that they are required to work or face additional punishment such as solitary confinement, denial of opportunities to reduce their sentence, and loss of family visitation. They have no right to choose what type of work they do and are subject to arbitrary, discriminatory, and punitive decisions by the prison administrators who select their work assignments.
That would make it so that 1) only independently wealthy people make up congress and/or 2) congress would be highly susceptible to bribery.
I kind of wish that people could vote on their wages though. Like instead of congress just voting to give themselves a raise, each congress person needed to present on why they would deserve it which is then voted on by the public.
Fundamentally the service you are paying for is risk alleviation.
Buying a whole ass property and putting a 20 year mortgage on it is a pretty big risk, home prices fluctuate wildly, shit can go sideways, things can break, anyone who's ever had to suddenly face a situation where "You now have to cough up 10s of thousands of dollars asap or your home becomes condemned" understands this. It happens.
Renting means the landlord assumes this risk for you, they now have to be the one who goes bankrupt if the boiler, washing machine, dishwasher, toilet, sink, whatever suddenly shits the bed and now you have a small pond in your living room or whatever.
Renters get to have a home to live in, with many renters rights, but they at any time can just walk away from the deal and go find somewhere else to live.
If you buy a home, do you think you can suddenly go "ah nevermind Im not feeling it anymore" to the bank and walk away from your mortgage? No, it's an assumed risk you are now chained to for 20 years.
You either have to find some other person willing to buy that risk off of you (sell your house), which is a HUGE amount of effort and requires lawyers and realtors and etc, or live with it.
Renters get to swerve all that and THAT is primarily what you are paying for.
Once you own a home you begin to understand how enormous some random bullshit bad dice roll can quite suddenly empty your entire bank account.
A pipe explodes? a bird decides to fly through your window? Your shower suddenly cracks? Your washing machine shits the bed?
You are the only person around who is liable for all that now when you literally own it, which means you and only you are responsible for fixing it. Hope you had the money set aside.
If you are renting? You call the landlord and they fix it and you dont have to pay a single penny
Every single day you spend living in the home is wear and tear on the facilities. You use the machines, you open and close doors and drawers, that adds up to non zero costs.
Do you think Air conditioners never break down from use? Fridge blowers dont suddenly shit the bed? Furnaces dont require yearly maint?
That shit is expensive and if no one lived in the building, all of it could be shut off.
This is all stuff you are leveraging onto the landlord when you rent, so yes, obviously that is worth a monetary value.
Your response sounds a lot like you didnt read a single thing written.
Its closer to "collect rent to pay for the constant deluge of random shit breaking down and failing"
Typically landlords dont actually make a lot of "take home" pay per hour, its a full time job. People seriously underestimate the enormous amount of bureaucracy involved in maintaining a rental space. Theres mountains of legal paperwork all the time. Every single thing that gets fixed has to be tracked and filed and entered in and accounted. Money has to be tracked very carefully so you dont get audited by the feds. etc etc.
Its not as simple as "call the plumber", its...
"call up the insurance agency, tell them what happened, send a bunch of emails, get the approved in network plumber assigned to you, the plumber agency calls you, you confirm the time the plumber will arrive, they then fax you a bunch of paperwork to fill out, you fill that out and then file your own copies, you then send that back to the plumber agency, they send you back some more info, you have to copy and file THAT now, then you have to go find your notification of entry paperwork and make a copy of that, then you gotta go let the tenant know when the plumber is going to arrive and deliver them the notification of entry..."
...
"then on the day of you get further coordination, you have to drive over to the location and use your keys to let the plumber in, give them access to what's needed, then make sure they fix it, then they give you even more paperwork to fill out, then you make copies of that, then you file all that, then you have to followup with the insurance agency and let them know everything is fixed..."
...
"Then later in the year when you are doing your taxes, you have to go find all that paperwork and make sure it's included as part of your filing, of course"
All for 1 single plumber trip.
And realize every single time something, anything has to be done, the landlord should be tracking that shit, and you can pretty quickly see why it starts to become a full time job.
Yes I did. You pay for everything with the rent you collect. You are not protecting anyone from any risk.
Not to mention homes appreciate, which is why you own them, so any of these "deluge of shit to fix" that you're supposedly protecting them from can easily be paid for with credit backed by the equity of the home.
Or just buying a new home with a warranty or an old home with deferred maintenance priced in.
Blah blah blah, the average upkeep on a home is 3% of the home's price. On a 400k home that's 12 grand. That's 1k a month for a 3br home. Rents for something like that would top 3k.
That's why we call it RENT and not a service. No one would pay over 3 times as much for something they could do themselves.
Homes appreciate on average 1% a year so you're really talking about 8k out of pocket or $800 per month for maintenance.
You're not taking taxes and interest on your mortgage into consideration and historically there's a higher return on investment to just use the money to invest in the S&P.
If landlords don't exist, what's your solution for people who don't want to own or aren't financially or mentally able to have that level of responsibility? You can be able to rent a house without wanting to own it, doesn't mean you want to live in a state owned apartment either...
Because you talked about the "risk" that landlords absorb like flood and fire.
And how much your mortgage is is predicated on how much of a down payment you put down. A down payment that tenants can't save because of the parasitic draw of landlords.
The only reason why renting is cheaper than buying now is because of rampant speculation by DUN DUN DUN LANDLORDS. You want me to be great full for a solution to a problem YOU CAUSED.
Before COVID made AirBnBs 10x money machines, and RealPage allowed landlords to fix prices, buying was actually a little cheaper than renting in all but the most desirable cities.
Regardless the Real Estate rentals making 100's billions of dollars. All the "risk" and equity that landlords are supposedly providing is all coming from tenants fully fucking stop.
As far a solution for the people that absolutely positively can not buy, that you couldn't give a fuck less about considering how many people you've kicked our onto the streets already, who previously could afford rent, it's called public housing, ie just give them a home. We already do it in Mississippi and it works great.
Bruh, landlords write off the interest on their taxes. Plus there's depreciation, a lot of landlords don't pay any taxes at all. You are such a landlord shill.
Tell me you move the goalposts without telling me you move the goalposts.
Homeowners don't file insurance claims to hire plumbers. And sorry but filing work orders or insurance claims is never going to turn into a full time job for a individual homeowner.
If you're talking about property management of multifamily complexes yes that's a job but when you spread that work out among all the units it turns into minutes of work.
And like I said, all this "risk" would be easily affordable if the tenants weren't paying rent.
You are so adorable, you really think landlords make billions because of how hard it is to pick up the phone and talk to an insurance agent.
Yes exactly, do tenants really think they could afford to pay for a new A/C suddenly? Could they use the 50% of their income they pay us now in rent to fix it? No, they're too stupid to do that, they'd just spend it on beer and avocado toast if landlords weren't around to take it from them.
It's no different than paying to rent anything else. You can't afford to buy a whole as 50k car when you visit a country, but you'll pay to rent a car for a week.
You can't afford to buy a whole ass house, but you do wanna rent one short term.
Not just in terms of raw cash to buy it, but also affording all the financial risk if things go sideways.
The renter has decided "yeah I can't afford if the engine shits the bed on a 50k car", if their rented cars engine shits the bed, the company they rent from handles it.
In return you pay a fee to temporarily use the item, without taking on that risk.
This is fairly basic stuff, but people seem to have missed these lessons in school I guess.
You clearly don't understand how profits work. Renting is profitable so all this risk you speak of paid for by the tenant along with the outsized profits landlords enjoy.
I agree with you on most points, landlords are inherently being paid for assuming risk. I believe what is unfair about the situation is that some of the risk they are supposed to assume is actually carried by government programs. The tenants are paying taxes that the landlord benefits from as a form of insurance (risk mitigation) while the tenant does not. This is a form of wealth redistribution in which the landlords benefit.
A prime example is flood, just like you said. FEMA has historically stepped in to mitigate that financial risk. The tenants' taxes essentially pay for "federal flood insurance" for the landlord.
Housing Bubble 2: Return of the Ugly
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