Does having an AirBNB setup make someone deserving of the guillotine or does that only apply to owners of multiple houses? What about apartments?
Please explain your reasoning as well.
If you own housing that you rent out more than you use it yourself, you’re a landlord.
If you rent out your house or apartment while you’re on vacation, I wouldn’t call you a landlord. But if you have a house or apartment that you only ever offer on AirBNB without ever using it yourself, you’re a landlord.
Btw, I don’t agree that being a landlord makes you deserving of a guillotine, but I do agree that we should limit the ownership of housing to natural persons, with a limit on how much space a person can own.
People extorting money due to the finite nature of land, for the sole reason of having been born with better access to capital.
It’s just making money, due to having money. They didn’t invent anything, they didnt discover and invest in an emerging company. They didn’t do anything innovative or clever. Anyone born to wealth could have done it. Which is why those are, by far and away, the vast majority of landlords.
Even a Conservative, union busting aristocrat like Churchill knew how bad landlordism was and landlords have been hated throughout all of human history. It’s only the current neoliberal plague who’ve attempted to moralise it with rich people worship and bootstrap paradoxes.
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Not everyone who is a landlord is born into wealth. Someone born into poverty can also be a landlord.
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By your logic, grocery stores are the same. They don’t grow the food. They don’t invent new food. There’s nothing wrong with grocery stores either.
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The main reason landlords are hated is jealousy. People hate those who have something they don’t. Especially when landlords worked for what they have and the ones who are jealous didn’t – they want to be handed things for free without contributing. Look at the old parable of the ant and the grasshopper.
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they can but they’re so few and far between that they don’t need mentioning. Loads will claim to have been born poor too but experience has left me unable to trust those claims. I even reference the fact that its not literally all off them, so I’m not sure why you needed to mention it again.
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All landlords, I was very clear about that but people making money through simply being a middle person sucks too. Nothing close to landlords though which is why I didn’t mention them and they aren’t covered by what I said.
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Ah yes, the old “bitter or a hypocrite” trope. It has to be one or the other, as the amoral people who throw it around can’t comprehend a moral objection to exploitation, usually due to poor empathy and even poorer social skills. The only people who want something for doing no work is landlords and shareholders. Its just astral level projection from people born to wealth, who even try to moralise their explanation by claiming everyone else, not born to their privilege and opportunity, must be lazy.
It turns out, they dont care about anyone being bitter or hypothetical, let alone the morality of just about anything. They just really don’t want people talking about inequality or exploitation.
The only people who want something for doing no work is landlords and shareholders.
You are incorrect about that. Landlords absolutely do work.
Its not me who’s wrong, as owning something isn’t work.
Now, they might do some repairs or maintenance but thats actual work and not what they’re paid for.
What they’re paid for is for doing no work and they, like shareholders, are the only people who expect to be paid for doing no work.
Our society is so messed up that they even have people declaring ownership is work, on their behalf.
Being a landlord is in fact, work.
Simply owning a property is called being a real estate investor. You can invest in property without even setting foot in it.
But maintaining it, interacting with tenants, etc is all work and that’s what a landlord does. As such, people should get paid for their work.
Again, you’re wrong. “Landlord” sn’t work.
landlord
a person or organization that owns a room, building, or piece of land that someone else pays rent to use
You can’t just make up you’re own definition of words. A landlord can outsource all of that to a management company and still be a landlord.
Maintenance is work and people should be paid for work. However, the landlord will get paid regardless of who does it. Thats because “landlord” isn’t work which is why “landlording” isn’t a verb.
“Landlording” is a word. It’s the act of performing the work of a landlord.
Anyone can pay someone else to do work. But the act of hiring others and making sure they’re doing their job is still work.
The majority of landlords are known as “mom and pop” which means they only have a few rentals. Many small landlords don’t hire a large team because there’s not enough money coming in from the rental to do so.
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Landlords aren’t inherently evil - it’s a useful job… a good landlord will make sure that units are well maintained and appliances are functional. A good landlord is also a property manager.
Landlords get a bad name because passive income is a bullshit lie. If you’re earning “passive income” you’re stealing someone else’s income - there’s no such thing as money for nothing, if you’re getting money and doing nothing it’s because someone else isn’t being properly paid for their work.
A landlord is anyone that owns a property, and rents it out, whether it’s commercial or residential, short-term, long-term, or even leasing land to hunters.
Landlords aren’t a problem per se. Think, for instance, of student housing. When I moved to go to school, I needed a place to stay, but I didn’t intend to live there for a long period of time. It would have been entirely unreasonable to buy a house or condo in order to go to school. I couldn’t stay at home, because my parents lived a long way away from any university. (Dorms are utter hell, as are co-ops. I’ve only ever had one roommate that wasn’t a complete and utter bastard.) You have a number of people who have the expectation in their career that they’re going to be moving from city to city frequently, or will need to be working on-site for a period of months; it’s not reasonable to expect them to buy either.
Then there are businesses. Most businesses don’t want to buy, and can’t afford to do so. Commercial real estate is it’s own mess.
Taxing landlords won’t solve the problem; landlords simply raise rents to achieve the same income. Preventing landlords from incorporating–so that they’re personally liable for everything–might help. But it would also limit the ability to build new housing, since corporations have more access to capital than individuals. (Which makes sense; a bank that would loan me $5M to build a small housing complex would be likely to lose $5M.) Limiting ownership–so a person could only own or have an interest in X number of properties–might help, but would be challenging for Management companies are def. part of the problem in many cases, but are also a solution to handing maintenance issues that a single person might not be able to reasonably resolve.
Government ownership of property is nice in theory, but I’ve seen just how badly gov’t mismanaged public housing in Chicago. It was horrific. There’s very little way to directly hold a gov’t accountable, short of armed revolution.
I don’t think that it’s the simple problem that classical Marxists insist it is. It’s a problem for sure. I just don’t think that there’s an easy solution that doesn’t cause a lot of unintended problems.
is its* own mess
If you are owning houses just to use them as AIRBNBs, yes. Profiting off of artificial scarcity and already having money is bad. Being wealthy doesn’t mean you deserve to be more wealthy.
Landlords aren’t profiting off of scarcity. They’re profiting off of having the means to do something that renters won’t: Buy a house with a 30yr mortgage, and leverage that money for something useful.
You too can buy a house. But everyone who shits on landlords, always spits out excuses why buying a house isn’t “feasible” or would “lock them down too much”, etc etc.
If you can buy 30k worth of tractor equipment, you can run it and make the money back you spent on it. That’s all landlords are doing - they’re buying when you won’t (not can’t…won’t) and then selling it back to you in trade for your “economic freedom” to move every 1-2 years and bitch about it.
Then we have the whole “fuckcars” movement, who wants everyone crammed into a shared-wall sardine can and nobody to own a house of their own ever; for the sake of population density so they can bike everywhere.
I’m lucky enough to have been financially able to buy a home. I had help making the down payment, but we’ve now got a 30 year mortgage. My monthly payments are less than what I was paying for rent, less than the average rent in the city by almost a third. I got this place with two above-average incomes, and had the good fortune to get it during the COVID housing and interest rate dip, and I still needed extra help.
If someone is stuck with renting, they’re likely paying more than they would for a mortgage. They can’t save up the money because they’re already lagging behind, and the housing market isn’t coming down in price, and wages absolutely aren’t keeping pace. No one is saying a house would “lock them down,” they’re pointing out they can never afford it because they can’t even come up with the money to show the bank they can save because they’re already paying above the potential mortgage payments every month.
But you’re saying they won’t, not can’t, so what should they do to come up with the money? Start selling kidneys? 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and that same link shows 71% have less than $2000 in their savings. So where exactly are people supposed to shit out your hypothetical $30,000?
Fellow home-owner, not a landlord. Not in the US but I think things are comparable.
Your mortgage repayments are less than what you were paying in rent, okay. However, do you feel that is a reasonable comparison?
Do you pay some sort of insurance? Property and or council taxes, rubbish removal, water and other things that you probably didn’t even know existed before becoming a home owner?
Do you know that your roof has and average life span of 30 years? Unless yours is new, you’ll need to start thinking about it at some point, and it can be pricey, together with all the rest of planned and unplanned maintenance that comes with owning a place.
Not really defending everything the person you are replying to said, but I think this topic too often gets simplified to monthly rent vs monthly mortgage repayments.
Even with the added costs of owning the home and upkeep, it’s only equivalent or just above rent, and that’s with the condo association fees and insurance. Even while renting I was stuck paying for utilities. And I’m highly aware that the roof needs replacing, given that we’ve got to replace ours within 5 years.
But if your point is “owning a home is more expensive than renting when you factor in all extra costs,” I want to again point out that most people are barely able to stay afloat. His point was that anyone can buy a house. Mine is that the money he thinks grows on trees literally does not exist for the majority of people.
Fair enough, my point was more that people that just assume that mortgage payment is X and is less than rent therefore I’m am being robbed aren’t looking at the whole picture, or aren’t being honest.
Except the mortgage payment ends after 30 years, and what you pay into the house is yours afterwards. Sure, the insurance and other taxes continue - but once the house is paid off, it’s done. I paid my mortgage off in 5 years by dumping every last dime I had into it and living off of nothing but scraps.
There’s way too much money in the hands of the wealthy. What are they going to do with it all? Invest in the stock market. All the good investments are overvalued. All the bad investments are have been saturated too. What else can they do with all of that money. They gotta put it somewhere.
So they put excess money into real estate. So the price of real estate has been driven up so much that it’s over valued like any other avenue of investment.
The stock prices being overvalued isn’t good but isn’t something that’ll affect regular people. But their real estate investments being over valued? Well that real estate isn’t an investment to someone that simply needs a place to live.
And that’s the problem, the price of housing is priced above what the people what people outside of the investor class can afford. And the investor class wants a return on their investment in the overprices real estate (that they collectively drove the price up on) so charge a lot for rent. Of course maybe if people moved to another area that would put downward pressure on the rent prices. But AirBnB is there so if this happens they can still get income from that when no one can afford the insanely high rent.
So the overarching problem is the wealthy have wayyy too much money and are dumping their excess wealth into real estate and pricing people that just need a place to live out of the market. AirBnB isn’t the cause of the problem but it makes the problem worse.
One of many problems caused by the unwillingness to simply tax the wealthy.
