this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2025
817 points (98.2% liked)
Late Stage Capitalism
789 readers
6 users here now
A place for for news, discussion, memes, and links criticizing capitalism and advancing viewpoints that challenge liberal capitalist ideology. That means any support for any liberal capitalist political party (like the Democrats) is strictly prohibited.
A zero-tolerance policy for bigotry of any kind. Failure to respect this will result in a ban.
RULES:
1 Understand the left starts at anti-capitalism.
2 No Trolling
3 No capitalist apologia, anti-socialism, or liberalism, liberalism is in direct conflict with the left. Support for capitalism or for the parties or ideologies that uphold it are not welcome or tolerated.
4 No imperialism, conservatism, reactionism or Zionism, lessor evil rhetoric. Dismissing 3rd party votes or 'wasted votes on 3rd party' is lessor evil rhetoric.
5 No bigotry, no racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, or any type of prejudice.
6 Be civil in comments and no accusations of being a bot, 'paid by Putin,' Tankie, etc.
founded 4 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That's because of land lords. You are the problem. People could afford to buy a house on a working class income in my parent's generation. But now you're using your own price speculation as evidence that we must maintain a class of renters instead of dealing with out of control prices?
Fuck no. The government should eminent domain it all for the original price plus normal inflation and put it on the market at that price. If it's older than 50 years or has had significant changes made to the original plan then we discount it. Houses are the only product we pay more for as they fall apart and it's entirely because real estate speculation is a thing.
People rented in your parent's generation too. My dad was born and raised in London 1931. They rented every house he lived in (good thing too because four of them were destroyed in The Blitz). My Mom was born in 1942 and raised in New York. Do you think most New Yorkers owned their homes even in 1942? And there was a point back then when they couldn't afford rent and had to live on an actual homeowner's screened-in porch for a summer.
There will always be a need to rent rather than buy. The price of rents is the issue, not the fact that they are available. And attacking someone who is not part of some corporate rent-raising scheme is unhelpful.
Yeah and tenements were an exploitation too. The problem of housing for sale and housing for rent are inextricably linked. Yeah getting rid of all rental housing is too far.
What is your proposed solution then?
The federal and state governments get into building housing again. Except this time they don't fuck them over with no jobs and services. Drop multi-unit housing buildings into the highest cost areas first. Rent is the cost to build, maintain, and remodel spread out over the next 50 years. The rent only goes up with actual inflation, but can be frozen for seniors or others on a fixed income. HUD can then take that asset and finance more projects. The more seed money they get, the faster it snowballs.
Basically drop some anchors in the market.
Then ban short term rentals. If that's not enough then tax vacancy.
Yeah maybe that's a bit extreme. I don't think the debt bubble would cause a bank collapse, we've had people get caught underwater before and a reduced price eminent domain would be similar to TARP in 2008. But we really do need to reign it in. And that's going to involve some people taking a bath on their loans. It's the one inescapable problem of solving housing inflation. There's always going to be X number of people who bought recently and will end up underwater. And the two answers are the government subsidizing their loan and the government forcing a sale where they would recover most of the loan. Legislation that isn't just another subsidy would likely subsidize the loan on a primary residence and force a sale to the government on other properties that are underwater and unable to be refinanced.
Get a job!
You explained everything well, some people just hate landlords no matter what and you can’t reason with them
Property maintenance is a job. Landlord is not.
Some landlords do property maintenance in addition to being a landlord.
So they repair their own dwellings, of which they own more than one, just like a regular homeowner? We don't call that a job.
Do you ever pay someone to repair your dwelling?
Nah, I got a landlord that sucks so much money from me that he's nice enough to do it for free!
The property maintenance the landlord did is actual labor. This doesn't imply 2K/mo or any more than what it would cost to pay someone to maintain the property is justified.
I'm just trying to illustrate there's a difference between the income the landlord steals as a landlord and the income they may earn from labor. Same exists with many petite bourgeoisie small business owners who do some amount of labor, but also exploit the labor of others.
One month ago my landlord offered me a deal, and it is a good deal, to buy this place for $67k. If I'd got a loan when I moved in here I would easily own it and have plenty money to spare if that was the price back then.
This house has 17 steps to go from the front door to the one car driveway. Underneath is a fucking cave. I tried to make a workshop out of it but it's sad and has no ventilation. Hell the main house has no ventilation. The fucking structure is held up by concrete blocks, unglued, unsealed, at places shimmed with pieces of wood and bricks. The foundation is about to slip off the hill.
That's just a story. You may not be very different from me but I've had some incredibly shitty landlords. I've lived in a cockroach and bedbug infested shithole. I've lived in terrible places but that one takes the cake. They were taking half my income to live in that place.
I know you mean well but please don't defend landlords. If anyone owns more than one home they need to be taxed to the extreme.
Nothing I said is a defense of landlords.
Do you think private landlords just sit at a desk all day for a month doing nothing?
Are they twerling thier evil mustache while they sit there?
Yes
Then you are ignorant.