this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2025
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A Boring Dystopia
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How is this legal.
How is it legal that people buy property and rent to those who want to rent instead of buy? My question to you is why wouldn't it be legal?
Pretty much been covered by others already.
In principle it’s fine and it fulfills a market need… not everyone wants to buy. But in practice, under-regulation in a market where many people want to buy but can’t exacerbates wealth inequality by reducing the available housing and driving up home costs. This in turn drives up rental costs. It’s a nasty cycle.
Absolutely, a problem that is improved by increasing housing supply (thus lowering costs). We need more government investment in building homes and to remove barriers that prevent or slow homes from being built. Simply outlawing rentals, as OP suggests, would do the opposite, it would take out a huge chunk of people who are building homes, drastically lowering supply and exploding housing prices.
There are definitely alternatives, where there is more tax incentive to own one home that you live in, and increasing penalties for holding more properties, especially for a long period of time and especially if they are in areas of high housing demand.
OP isn't directly suggesting making rentals illegal; in fact it's a bit vague what specific practice they're blaming. My best guess is that they generally don't feel laws should allow/incentivize owning so many housing properties, especially if one is not personally doing anything to earn money from them.
A responsible landlord is "doing" arrangements for property maintenance and handling all tax and other legal requirements, and my hard feelings are towards slumlords who let dwellings become unsafe, or property flippers who kick all the renters out and build new dwellings to sell to more wealthy buyers.
But also, isn't the hate for landlords equally applicable to banks and other financial institutions that hold mortgages? They really are earning money by no other responsibility than having the capital available at the start.
The solution is for the state to guarantee that everyone must have a place to live. Shelter is a human necessity, it should not be conditional.
Are you envisioning the government being a major landlord, like in Singapore? It seems to work really well for that country, but Americans seem uncomfortable with the idea of government housing.
Who actually wants to spend 1/3 of their paycheck on something every month and not own it?
It dawned on my that my wife and I pay 30k a year to live in our house. I made 65k last year, the most I've ever made and the amount I told myself in Highschool that if I could get a job making that I'd be set. Feels like I'm still bussing tables at fucking Texas Roadhouse.
For context, im in tech and she's in the arts. Combined we're at about 110k a year. Wild that that feels like just scraping by.
Biggest plusses people argue in favor is not having to maintain the property yourself and being able to move much more easily. If you are one of the people who would prefer to buy, I highly recommend you do so. Maintaining your own stuff is quite nice, as it lets you keep it up to the quality you desire.
Lmao this guy thinks landlords maintain the property.
Great, you can move more easily to another overpriced unmaintained property. You will own nothing and you will be happy about it.
My exact thoughts. Never had anything in my apartments maintained by the landlord, always had to maintain everything myself at my own expense. And despite maintaining it for them, they still keep our deposits when we try to leave.
Keep our deposits, jack up rent despite doing nothing for us, and when they sell to a new landlord you have rich freaks coming into your home while you’re eating your lunch in your kitchen to stare at you and inspect the place to decide if they want to purchase you or not.
When is the last time you bought a furnace, a water heater, or a new roof for a property you rent? Ever?
It isn't that the owner isn't maintaining it, it is that they aren't maintaining it do the standard you would prefer. And that absolutely is an issue. And it is one of the primary benefits of no longer paying a landlord and instead buying a property and maintaining it to your own standards. You will almost certainly end up with a maintenance standard you like as you will be the one dictating and implementing it.
A basic standard includes a ceiling that isn’t caving in, a foundation that isn’t sinking causing the windows to pull the wall above them apart, but either way the landlord won’t address it and I’d never have the money to correctly address it myself. In those instances it feels less like my personal standard isn’t being met but rather the basics and fundamentals aren’t being maintained.
I would love to own though. If I were ever in a position to own and afford maintenance I would feel safer.
I apologize by the way if I write in a confusing way, or have a hard time communicating my point, I have trouble with that. Owning is preferable in my opinion, property and privacy are power and a form of independence I long for.
In a word, corruption.
In two words, legal corruption.
In three words, blatant legal corruption.
In four words, United States political system.
Meh.
This isn't an America problem. People do this in every country
This is capitalism not corruption
For everyone here's a fun thought experience. You have a room with 100 people. In that room is 100$. 1 person (Elon Musk let's say) holds 95$. 4 people (let's say various CEO class people) hold $1 each. The remaining 95 people share the remaining 1$.
And yet here we are all fighting because some of our deluded asses think we are going to be one of those 5 people one day.
Its definitely not capitalism. Our system survives by creating economic slaves, for instance the mortgage acts as a gatekeeper in the fiat system, by locking up economic value and an inelastic good in a form that can only be unlocked by completing the payment obligations. Housing rises in price to max out the metaphorical bucket of whatever interest rates allow for debt accumulation, and property ownership is controlled by one's ability to secure debt. This ensures that the financial system has a steady stream of obligations that help sustain the flow of currency, which helps drive aggregate demand.
The goal is to create a 2% inflation, as calculated by an index that excludes housing appreciation and investments, you require ever growing money supply. Money supply is grown via debt accumulation, this then funnels down into foods and services, excluding substitutions and hedonic adjustments, reversing technological deflation, deriving a 2% inflation to a dynamic basket of goods. Housing works well for this because housing is finite and demand in inelastic; prices can rise faster than fundamentals, and it is therefore a liquidity sponge that is a necessary liability to take.
It's WORSE in the US than in most other countries, including all other wealthy countries, though. Differences in scale matter
Taken to the extremes it will inevitably reach if not sufficiently restrained, capitalism IS corruption with fancy packaging. It's right in the name: it's an ism (belief system) where accruing capital is the most important of ALL things.
In every Western country other than the US, accepting large sums of money and other perks from rich people who want favors is the DEFINITION of corruption, whether or not there's a specifically stated quid pro quo.
It may be worse in the USA but capitalism absolutely is the reason it happens.
It's the same here in the UK, unfortunately. Is that neoliberalism? Or just a rehashed kind of feudalism? I don't know, I'm mostly a gardener.
Yeah, it's pretty much a defining aspect of Neoliberalism. Just like turning the corruption up to 11 in both severity and blatancy is a hallmark of the economics of fascism.