Comment on Landlords are parasites
Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I never understood this brain dead obsession that Marxists have with landlords.
Landlords own property like anybody else does or could, and they use their property to offer a commodity in demand a for a fee like any other service. You never hear anybody complaining about a car rental service or hotels or any other rental service, just this one. This is a strong sign that it’s not based in any merit, it’s just ideological brain rot.
You could be nuanced and argue that certain types of landlords are bad or that certain practices are harmful, and that’s fine, but to say the concept of people renting out housing units is inherently bad just because is just stupid. Renting has it’s advantages even if you don’t understand or won’t acknowledge them, there’s are plenty of reasons why renting exists.
You don’t understand the problem Marxists have with pure capitalism? That’s like their whole thing. An ownership class hoarding resources, and passively generating income from idle capital while not actively contributing is like the greatest sin in their ideology.
I personally think it’s a bit melodramatic. There’s a world of difference between renting your spare room, or the 2nd floor of your house, and a hedgefund buying 20,000 single family houses.
Just wanna point out that both BlackRock and your average landlord gramma have exactly the same class interests in fighting against rent control, rent freeze, or construction of affordable social housing.
This is nonsense, there’s ZERO merit to rent control in 2025. It is a proven failure. There’s mountains of studies, cases studies, and reports spanning over decades from cities all over the world, that show the same exact thing. Rent control does NOT control prices or fixing housing issues. In fact it does the opposite, it strangles supply by disincentivizing developers from building new units and it jacks up prices by incentivizing landlords to increase prices every time they get a new tenant, and by extension it also incentivizes landlords to continuously seek out new tenants for this purpose.
Rent control directly benefits your average landlord and hurts the average tenant. People have to incredibly misguided to still push for it. Massive corporations like Blackrock are unaffected by these policies. They’ll profit either way because they control way more than just real estate. Their issue is not market incentives, it’s accountability. So no your grandparents owning a triplex and renting out two units doesn’t put them on the same team as Blackrock.
There’s mountains of studies, cases studies, and reports spanning over decades from cities all over the world, that show the same exact thing. Rent control does NOT control prices or fixing housing issues
Rent control obviously reduces prices. By setting up a maximum price, prices can’t raise further, it’s not rocket science. This policy was literally implemented in my homeland, Spain, when a few years ago an inflation-cap was implemented so that rents can’t rise above CPI. This has saved millions and millions of euros of tenants, again, because it’s not rocket science: if you correctly implement a rent cap (not difficult), prices don’t go above the cap.
The same happened with the Berlin rent freeze that passed through referendum and was applied to some areas of the city. The comparative economic studies that analyzed the evolution of prices in rent-capped areas proved empirically that prices had gone up slower in rent-capped areas than in free market regime. I don’t know what kind of bullshit neoliberal YouTuber you’re watching, but they’re lying to you about empirical evidence.
As for housing supply, I agree, rent cap affects supply, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. When Milei removed rent caps from Buenos Aires, it became easier to find listed flats for rent in the city: because the people formerly living there were evicted since they couldn’t afford to pay fucking rent! What a great solution neoliberals offer us: just fucking evict the poors!! I’ve already brought up evidence you can look up, can you do the same to prove your point? Spoiler alert: no you can’t because neoliberalism is anti-scientific.
Regardless, rent cap is only meant to be a temporary measure and I agree that it won’t solve fundamentally the underlying issue behind housing: treating as a commodity instead of as a human right. Build millions of public housing units, force businesses to move to smaller cities to fight overcentralization, do good urban planning, and establish socially owned housing. It’s the only model that has abolished homelessness in history, and you can keep denying reality, but Soviets enjoyed rents of 3% of average income throughout their lives while people in the modern capitalist world can choose between spending 40% of their wage in housing or literally dying in the streets.
I understand what their ideology is, I’m making the point that it’s stupid and illogical.
I personally think it’s a bit melodramatic. There’s a world of difference between renting your spare room, or the 2nd floor of your house, and a hedgefund buying 20,000 single family houses.
I agree with you, but that’s also kind of my point. I don’t have an issue with nuanced takes like this. There’s clearly a difference between mom and pop landlords who own duplexes or a second house to help them out and Blackrock buying up entire neighborhoods to purposefully manipulate market prices. We can agree that the former is fine, and the latter isn’t. But at the same time we can also acknowledge that the issue is not inherent to markets, private ownership, or renting, these bad practices are a byproduct of poor policy.
Shelter is a necessity. A hotel isn’t.
Property is a limited resource. When people scalp concert tickets they get vilified. When they do the same thing for something necessary for survival people like you defend it with “well there are pros and cons…”
But this is a fundamentally flawed analogy. Renting is not scalping. If you want to criticize specific practices like predatory leases or speculative hoarding, that is a fair and nuanced position. But claiming that renting itself is inherently exploitative ignores how markets function.
Just because something is a necessity does not mean it can be free. Food, water, electricity, heating, and medicine are all essential, yet we still pay for them. Not because we should, but because we have to. These goods and services come from complex systems that require capital, labor, infrastructure, and logistics. Every step costs money. To keep these systems running, consumers have to pay enough to cover those costs and allow for future investment. That payment can come through taxes in public systems or through private transactions in the market. Either way, the cost is real and unavoidable.
Housing is no different. Building homes is expensive. It requires land, materials, skilled labor, permits, and time. Buying a home is a major investment, and renting exists as a practical alternative. Not everyone can or wants to buy, and renting provides access to housing without the upfront burden of ownership. There’s a huge luxury rental market for wealthy people, even though they have the means to buy houses. This means that there are real advantages to renting that go beyond just not being able to buy a house.
Like any market, housing is shaped by supply and demand. When supply is low and demand is high, prices rise. That is not exploitation. It is basic economics. If you want to make housing more affordable, the solution is not to vilify landlords or pretend rent is evil. The solution is to increase supply. Build more homes. Reform zoning laws. Encourage development. More housing means more competition, and more competition drives prices down. We know this formula works. We’ve seen it work countless times. Actually we’re seeing it work right now. Take a look at Austin and how they’re rental and housing prices have been dropping considerable over the years. That is how you fix the imbalance. Not by attacking the existence of rent, but by addressing the root cause of scarcity.
Building homes is expensive. It requires land, materials, skilled labor, permits, and time. Buying a home is a major investment
And yet it not very long ago it was feasible for a single income earner on minimum wage to not only be able to afford a home, but do so while supporting a family. So what has ballooned in price to make that out of reach for the vast majority of people? The land, materials, skilled labor, permits, or the house itself due to it being used as an investment?
Like any market, housing is shaped by supply and demand.
There are many viable houses sitting vacant because the landlords would rather wait for someone that can afford the absurdly high rent than risk lowering the market value of rent for their other properties.
If the first person in line to a concert purchases every ticket then resells them for 10x the cost the solution is not “make more tickets available”. The scalper will just buy them as well.
And yet it not very long ago it was feasible for a single income earner on minimum wage to not only be able to afford a home, but do so while supporting a family.
Could that person be a woman? Was that by any chance directly after a major war that significantly reduced the male population? If you want to focus on the nice part that affected a single slender class of people and ignore all the bad parts stacked on to everyone else that made the conjunction possible there’s a political party made just for you.
And yet it not very long ago it was feasible for a single income earner on minimum wage to not only be able to afford a home, but do so while supporting a family.
You’re correct, but at the same time, buying a house was still a very expensive back then as well. It was major purchase for most people, just not to the same extant relative to today.
So what has ballooned in price to make that out of reach for the vast majority of people? The land, materials, skilled labor, permits, or the house itself due to it being used as an investment?
All of the above, but also, by far the single biggest reason why house prices have gone up is because we haven’t been building enough houses to meet demand. If you look up the US housing inventory over time, you’ll basically see that it has basically collapsed since the great recession to near all time lows. In the meantime, this country’s population has grown quite a bit since then, we’ve added well over 20 million people since 2010. So there you have it, that’s the root cause. If we built houses as the same rates as we have in decades past, we would be an experiencing a housing boom right now reverse the current seller’s market into a buyer’s market.
There are many viable houses sitting vacant because the landlords would rather wait for someone that can afford the absurdly high rent than risk lowering the market value of rent for their other properties.
It’s actually more nuanced than that. The majority of the houses that are vacant are either seasonal houses in states like Maine, Florida, or West Virginia or they’re undergoing renovations ((source)[www.realtor.com/…/states-with-most-vacant-homes/]). There is still a decent portion that are being held as investments, but the number of actually vacant units are smaller than a lot of people think. As for the ones that being held for investment, it’s not your mom and pop landlords who are doing that, it’s massive corporations like Blackrock or JP Morgan Chase who actually have the means to sit on empty properties, pay the taxes, and play long manipulative game.
If the first person in line to a concert purchases every ticket then resells them for 10x the cost the solution is not “make more tickets available”. The scalper will just buy them as well
If you want to make the argument that corporations should be banned or greatly limited to buying residential housing, then I agree with you. However, that is a different discussion than saying that rent is inherently bad.
Marxist here. The reason why I argue and obsess about landlordism is that housing is a human right, whereas rental of a car isn’t and neither of a hotel room. It’s also important because of how much pressure it exerts on workers, very often 40% of a person’s income goes to rent, which is absurd and destroys the quality of life of many people, and perpetuates poverty cycles.
You are right in that landlords offer a commodity in demand for a fee, but it’s not like any other service since landlordism essentially doesn’t require work: it’s purely an unnecessary wealth transfer from wealth-less individuals who can’t afford a home to wealthy individuals who could afford (or more likely inherited) one. We Marxists also famously have problems with commodity production, it’s quite literally the core of Marxism: that the labour of workers is unfairly appropriated by capital owners.
As for renting having its advantages, Marxists don’t deny that, and are very much in favour of social rent, that is, publicly owned housing rented at maintenance costs. This way, there is no relationship of exploitation between a landlord and a tenant: you can just rent one of the collective houses without your wealth being used for anything other than its average maintenance cost. For example in the Soviet Union workers rented housing at about 3% of their income. We are not against the idea of renting, we are against the idea of renting from a private owner that extracts wealth unfairly from the tenant
The reason why I argue and obsess about landlordism is that housing is a human right
So is food and water, but we still pay for them. It doesn’t take an economist to understand that it takes a lot of capital and labor to get these things to us, and these require money. Therefore, they have to be traded for to cover the costs. In this case, it’s by paying a fee.
It’s also important because of how much pressure it exerts on workers, very often 40% of a person’s income goes to rent, which is absurd and destroys the quality of life of many people, and perpetuates poverty cycles.
This is ignorant because it assumes that rental market is static, when in fact, it is very much dynamic. How expensive or affordable rent is depends on things like supply, demand, and policy.
it’s not like any other service since landlordism essentially doesn’t require work
Who told you this? This is just wrong. This is the issue with Marxism as an ideology, it’s entirely a built on a house of cards. It’s entirely on baseless assumptions built on other baseless assumptions. Simply insisting that landlords don’t do anything without providing any substance is not a valid argument, that just the assertion fallacy.
Landlord do actually do stuff. They’re responsible for their property. This means they have to put in the work in maintaining it, not only to preserve their property’s value, but also because they’re liable if their property causes harm to their tenants or anybody else. Landlords are responsible for things like
Repairs for any structural decay, damage, or malfunction (this ranges from changing light bulbs to changing the entire heating system)
General maintenance like snow removal, pest removal, the general appearance of the building
All the legal mumbo jumbo like drafting up the leases, following regulations, and meeting safety standards
All the finances of the building, this is especially true for multifamily buildings. They have to pay for the sewage and water, because they’re shared by the whole building as well as the common electricity (usually has it’s own panel). They also have to deal with the hassle of paying the taxes and house insurance on the building.
Tenant relations, again this is especially true for multifamily buildings. Landlords have to be able to settle disputes and complaints between their tenants, and they have to be willing to take legal action against tenants that are causing harm to the others
This is all stuff that tenants would have to personally deal with if they owned property, but because they’re renting all of it get outsourced to the landlords. However, all of these involve the tenants actually being in the building. If there’s a vacant unit, the landlord is also responsible for inspecting the unit, cleaning it, advertising the vacancy, screening applicants, and signing the new tenants.
You might scoff at this as nothing, but it’s actually really annoying time consuming. So much so that there’s an entire industry that revolves around property management. There’s a reason why even rich people sometimes opt to rent instead of just buying a new place. To some people the hassle of owning and maintaining a property is just not worth it.
We Marxists also famously have problems with commodity production, it’s quite literally the core of Marxism: that the labour of workers is unfairly appropriated by capital owners.
I’m aware, and Marxism is also famously well known for falsely believing that labor is the only source of value in an economy when that’s just not true. Labor is just one component in the economy, not the only one. An economy needs capital, leadership, entrepreneurship, specialization (education/expertise), and innovation on top of labor to function.
As for renting having its advantages, Marxists don’t deny that, and are very much in favour of social rent, that is, publicly owned housing rented at maintenance costs. This way, there is no relationship of exploitation between a landlord and a tenant: you can just rent one of the collective houses without your wealth being used for anything other than its average maintenance cost. For example in the Soviet Union workers rented housing at about 3% of their income.
It’s funny you say this because this show that you actually have no idea what you’re talking about. Three things:
Soviet workers didn’t have a normal income like we do. Their incomes were centrally planned by the government, and they were distributed as a part of national budgeting scheme. Soviet incomes were not based on merit, demand, experience, or specialization but on administrative policy. This means that a doctor and a factory worker got paid a similar amounts, and Soviet salaries were notorious for being very low.
The Soviet Union actually set the rents via policy. A part of the reason why the predetermined government salaries were so low is because so many things were heavily subsidized, including housing. That was the government’s grand argument as to why people got next to nothing, they argued that they’re getting benefits elsewhere. Now, the government decided they would impose a symbolic 3-6% (depends on the regions) rental fee to remind people that housing was allocated, not owned, and could be revoked and reassigned at any time.
The Soviet Union solution to housing is one of the most historically famous examples of failure. They central government was very inefficient and ignorant in their planning. They allocated a lot of resources to build factories but barely any for houses for the workers that moved there, they set out of touch housing quotas that did not align with local needs, and they were rigid and uncoordinated in their execution which led to a lot of poor quality buildings and a lot of delays. The buildings that did get built were plagued with mismanaged, poor maintenance, and extremely long wait lists. You might not know this, but the Soviet housing model that you idolize actually had a lot, and I mean a lot, of housing shortages. That system collapsed for a reason.
Keep in mind, I am not against the idea of public housing. I do think that government has role to play in helping solve the housing crises. There are some people who lack the means to ever get housing on their own regardless of how affordable the market is, and those people should get government subsidized housing. However, this means that public housing should only apply to a specific subsection of the population, not the whole population. Trying to centrally control and plan the housing market will just lead to a fiasco similar what the Soviet Union experienced. That’s a not a real solution, that’s just introducing a host of unnecessary problems.
Our current system works, it’s been proven to work. What it needs is some tweaks and updates to get it back on track. It’s really not that complicated, we have a housing shortage, so we need to build way more houses. We want lower prices, so have to build so many units that the supply eclipses the demand. We want more dense, less car centric housing, then we have to update our zoning laws to allow it. We want to speed things up, so we have to remove obstacles standing in the way like unnecessarily long approval processes for new construction.
We can’t cling on to failed ideologies like Marxism as some sort of new and innovative solution, because it’s not. Marxism is a proven failure, and that won’t change this time or the next. If we want to get anything done we have to remain practical, nuanced, realistic, knowledgeable, precise with our discourse and policy. That’s our only way forward.
We are not against the idea of renting, we are against the idea of renting from a private owner that extracts wealth unfairly from the tenant
You never explained why you think this is the case, you just insist that it is by constantly repeating it. Tell me the specific mechanics that you believe make private renting inherently unfair or exploitative, because I don’t see any legitimate case for this position.
Marxism is also famously well known for falsely believing that labor is the only source of value in an economy when that’s just not true
But it is true, and it has been empirically proven time and time again. Just for reference, you can check Paul Cockshott’s 2014 paper. There has been no serious reply to this paper, or any followup by neoliberal economists finding any other variable explaining the creation of value to the extent that labour does. It is empirically true that labour is the only source of value, and you would need empirical evidence to argue otherwise, which you don’t have because it doesn’t exist.
Everything you said about the Soviet Union is simply false. I’ll come up with the references later, busy now, but you’re just making stuff up.
But it is true, and it has been empirically proven time and time again
Source: Dude, trust me
Just for reference, you can check Paul Cockshott’s 2014 paper.
I know that you just linked the very first link on google that appeals to your confirmation bias, because based on the content of this paper, you 100% did not read it.
First of all, this is not a study. It’s a response paper by 3 Marxist academics to another study that they disagreed with. Second of all, at no point in this response do they ever make the claim that labor is the only source of value in an economy. They just argue that it is a significant factor of value, which was supposedly not factored in the study they’re critiquing. So you saying that they argued that “labour is the only source of value” is just you making things up. Third of all, nobody ever responds to response papers except for the authors of the original study being critiqued, and that only ever happens on occasion. So this is not the smoking gun you think it is.
Everything you said about the Soviet Union is simply false. I’ll come up with the references later, busy now, but you’re just making stuff up.
You won’t provide anything, ever, because you have nothing. You’re just straight up factually wrong on this.
I’m actually not gonna bother giving you references because you’re just a blatant anticommunist making stuff up
…and there it is! You tried googling for anything to confirm your biases, but you couldn’t find anything because you’re wrong. Instead of being honest and admitting that you’re wrong, you did what all Marxists do and made up the lamest excuse imaginable as to why you can’t provide sources for your own claims. You can’t even defend what you say. This is just sad dude.
I’m not going to change the mind of someone who doesn’t listen to facts.
Your grand rebuttal is just you saying that I’m wrong without even providing any substance, you’re not able to provide sources because there’s nothing that supports what you say, and you can’t even elaborate on your own opinions. Yeah, I’m totally the one who doesn’t listen to facts, get real.
Go on licking your landlord’s boots (or leeching off your tenants if you’re lucky).
Look, Bart just did the thing! When a Marxist is called out on their bullshit and they’re clearly proven to be wrong, they can’t be honest and admit they’re wrong, that’s would be acting in good faith and that’s just against the core of the ideology. Therefore, you have to come up with any lame ass pejorative or insult to shut down the conversation without addressing anything. That way you get to feel like a pseudo intellectual without actually accepting your ignorance. Classic Marxism.
It’s so fucking dumb. Landlords aren’t the problem, corporations owning hundreds and thousands of homes is what’s driving rent through the roof.
That’s definitely a factor, but our housing supply is largely self inflected with outdated and poorly thought out zoning laws. Developers can’t build anything because the process to build anything takes years (sometimes decades), a fuck ton of money before they even break ground, and the law requires literally requires them to dedicate a certain ratio of their property (sometimes half) for parking. Not only that but so many projects get easily killed by NIMBYs for dumbest reasons. It’s no wonder we have shortage.
If we look at places that are building a shit ton of units, like Austin, the prices are actually going down and have been for years. Both the rent prices and house prices have gone down in Austin because, for whatever reason, they’re the only ones that figured out that the way to solving a housing crises is to pump the supply to the point where it exceeds demand, thus causing prices to fall. That’s what we need nationwide.
Noved@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
Uhh, I hear people complaining about those services all the time, see Air BnB.
Regardless, a rental car or hotel is not a living requirement like a semi-permanent home is. Definitely comparing apples to oranges here.
You can acknowledge the benefits to renting while also acknowledging it’s an unbelievably toxic and abused system that profits off the poor for the gain of the rich.
Until everyone is housed, no one should be profiteering off thoes that aren’t.
doingthestuff@lemy.lol 3 days ago
In my area, the majority of homeless have cars. A car rental can be more important than a home to rent for survival for more people than you might think.
Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com 2 days ago
That’s more of a testament of how fucked up housing is in your area. That would be like saying tents are more vital than housing because many homeless use them instead.
doingthestuff@lemy.lol 2 days ago
No, it’s more of a testament to how car-dependent our area is. You can live without a house, but you can’t live without a car, or access to someone who will drive you. Housing here is comparitively affordable.
SparroHawc@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Car rentals aren’t as much of an issue, because of how much less expensive it is to own a second-hand car. If you’re homeless and you need access to a car, you don’t go to a rental place, you get a beater from Craigslist for about the same price it would cost to rent a car for a month (if not less).
doingthestuff@lemy.lol 2 days ago
I work with a lot of homeless, and I have known a few who have rented a car in a pinch. But you’re right, most just have an old beater they own.
Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The complaints are about the scale of people who are opting to turn their units into Airbnbs, which takes them off the rental market, which deceases supply, and thus increases prices. You’ll almost never hear somebody complain about how someone turning their property into a hotel is an inherently bad idea.
I disagree with this premise. I don’t think that renting is inherently toxic, abusive, or exploitative. There’s no valid argument to argue as such. Property is a commodity, those who have excess of this commodity are opening it up for others to use for a fee. That’s a service, and just like any other service there’s nothing wrong with it. I also think that you’re misguidedly assuming that only poor people rent, which is not true. There’s an absolutely massive luxury rental market as there is one for every budget and style. It truly is a market, and like all markets, it’s still dictated by the law of supply and demand.
I think the crux of our disagreement stems from the fact that I think our housing crises stem from poor and outdated policy, not from an economic system. Capitalism has been proven to be extremely effective at efficient mass production, so why is this not the case for housing? It’s because we have backwards housing policy. It takes years, sometimes even decades, for any developer to get their project approved. It takes a lot of money to go through all the legal proceeding, lawsuits, fees, and demands made by the town/city. Even if the developer finally gets to the point where they can finally start building, they’re still now allowed by law to build mixed units or multifamily units, they have to build either single family homes or strip malls. Not only that, but a big percentage of the property has to be dedicated to parking spaces, again this is by law. Even if the developer complies with all these nonsensical laws, demands, pays the fees, and spends years going through the process… the whole thing can be killed at any moment by NIMBYs for the dumbest reasons. This is why we have a housing crises.
You want to fix the housing market? Do what Austin has been doing for the past decade. For whatever reason, it seems like they’re only ones in the country who figured out that if they make the development process easier, reform their zoning laws, and incentivized developers to build, they can build so many new units that they supply of housing not only meets demands by exceeds it, thus leading to a decrease in prices. Austin has seen pretty substantial decreases in both rents and house prices, and the trend is not slowing down (source). The average rent of a 2 bedroom apartment there is around $1400, which is well below the national average of $1630 (source). Keep in mind, that Austin is a big and growing city, and yet they’re prices have nearly dropped to prepandemic levels. Clearly they’re doing something right, and the rest of us need to follow their lead.
That’s sounds to me like a way more grounded, nuanced, practical, and realistic plan and approach than just simply insisting that renting as a concept is bad because Marxism insists that capitalism is bad, and therefore we should get rid of it and replace it with a system that’s proven to be worse. A rigid ideology that’s built on a house of cards made up of baseless assumptions and relies and the most extreme option at every turn shouldn’t have any place in modern discourse.