Comment on Landlords are parasites

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Gorilladrums@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

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

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

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