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.
Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com 4 days ago
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.
Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 4 days ago
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.
Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com 3 days ago
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.
Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Here’s an actual study’s conclusion on the matter:
Soaring home rental prices are affecting all of Spain: almost 40% exceed 1,500 euros a month
Source: Dude, trust me
That’s such a backwards take. Of course it’s a bad thing. There’s more people that want houses than there are available units. Developers won’t build new ones because there’s no incentivize to do so. It’s in their best interest to hold to artificially restrict supply and jack up prices every time a new tenant moves in. So you end up with higher rents and less units.
This is just moronic at this point. It’s crystal clear that you’re just repeating because you think it’s sounds virtuous, but you haven’t given a single thought as to what that even means and you won’t ever provide any explanation. If you apply the most elementary level of logic, anybody could understand that a house, including public houses, is something that costs money because it requires resources, time, and labor to make. Because of this, it is something that has to be traded for one way or another, and thus it is a commodity. Slapping the “human rights” label next to it is not going to change this reality.
Source: Dude, trust me
This has already been debunked. The fact that you keep repeating just shows that you’re disingenuous.