thanks for the detailed and explanatory response. love to see more of this commentary on lemmy rather than the ‘rent is evil’ crap that goes on around here.
Comment on Rent is theft
GreenShimada@lemmy.world 3 days agoPeople aren’t defending landlords per se. People are defending the opportunities afforded by having extra space and letting someone else pay what it costs to live there.
Renting as a concept goes back to antiquity, and this is an absolutist stupid take that makes it sound like OP doesn’t understand how real life works.
Not everywhere is a large city. Not all renters live in the same place for 20 years. Not all landlords are evil shitbags or faceless corporations. Sure, plenty are. Some are just families that are lucky to not have to sell their house if they move for work that lasts only a couple years.
I end up moving every couple of years, and so I’ve had to sublet the last part of a lease I’ve had, and gladly rented places from friends, random people on Craigslist, whatever, for weeks or months at a time. So I’m a thief because I sublet an apartment for 3 months? So dumb.
Long-term renting is really more the issue as landlords do just sit and leech and renters get nothing to show for it. But the fact remains that renting a room or an apartment is something that has since literally ancient times made more sense than huge amounts of unused housing you aren’t allowed to use. So this is actually a nuanced argument against a particular class of people and corporations. Meaning that the premise is flawed enough for most people to roll their eyes and ignore it.
The whole “rent is theft!” trope doesn’t even make sense from a political messaging viewpoint. What’s your suggested alternative? That’s not apparent at all. So this ends up sounding like saying “I want hot spaghetti for dinner!” and just expecting it to happen.
Also, a rather large number of people have rented something out, rented a room out, etc. thanks to AirBnB that this messaging makes enemies out of a whole lot of normal people by using absolute terms. People like me ask “Did my friends that helped me out steal from me? Of course not.”
If you think that anyone who thinks a reasonable exchange of a service for an agreed up on fee are committing theft, then you’ve alienated 98% of people with the premise alone by calling them criminals.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 3 days ago
GreenShimada@lemmy.world 3 days ago
and all the ‘rent is evil’ idiots i know in real life… took mommy and daddy’s money and became landlords themselves and now they complain about how taxes are evil
Yeah, the turn that the Trustifarians take is always so fast. Like you can not see them for a few weeks and suddenly the locks are gone, toes confined to shoes, and they’re already clamoring for trappings as a totem of having forsaken their “sordid past.” All the whiplash from suddenly realizing that your paths in life end in the same few places, simply because your ideals force others to push you away.
It’s really not too dissimilar from Flat Earthers - outrageous ideas that at first put you in a fun and weird community, but long term are the thing that makes everyone your enemy. Though, since Flat Earthers don’t specifically reject economic methods are part of their idealism, they can fare well for longer it seems. Though I don’t have data to back that up.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 2 days ago
pretty much. they cosplay at being working-class/poor because it makes them feel like they aren’t rich douchebags, and once it gets old/difficult/mom and dad get mad, they ‘grow up’ and stop doing it.
I am in my 40s and I meet a lot of trustafians. they get so ANGRY when they realize I am not like them and I’m some ‘loser’ who made my own way up in life with hard work and didn’t spend my 20s partying and traveling and working low-income jobs because it was ‘authentic’. i had a low income job because it was the only one I could get until I had enough experience to get a better paying job.
GreenShimada@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I hear you on this. I was homeless as a kid, and in college I had a friend who I just didn’t understand was wealthy, as I hadn’t learned the subtle social cues outside of a small town context. I was sort of still processing the fact that yes, living for years in the back of a store and not a house was not the experience that other people had, and it is defined as being homeless. Though certainly not as bad as living out of a car or on the streets. “Homeless lite” maybe? Anyway, I told her this one day and she immediately came back with “Oh! Me too! We lived in a hotel for 3 months while looking for a house to buy!” Even trying to get a bit deeper…nope. Steamrolled into her Eloise story.
A year or so later, another friend got it out of her that she, indeed, did have a “small” trust fund for college. To her credit, she wasn’t a shitbag at least. Meant well, but just zero wherewithal about the discrepancy between paying daily to live somewhere and making up a bed every night of camper seat cushions and a sleeping bag
Riverside@reddthat.com 3 days ago
Six paragraphs of you not understanding the issue: the problem is not the concept of renting a living space for a given time, the problem is private rent, i.e. rent for the landowner’s profit.
Every single problem with current rent could be solved by socializing housing and making it available to rent at production+maintenance prices, and people could still move freely without being tied to a house in particular, without the risk of being evicted, would be able to paint the walls and have pets…
SpaceCadet@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Just because things could theoretically be handled differently doesn’t make landlords “thieves” as the title claims.
I’m currently a home owner and not a landlord, but if I would become a landlord, it wouldn’t be in my power to implement any of your solutions, leaving in the middle whether they have merit or not.
All I can do is try to live in the system that exists, and in that context there’s nothing unethical about charging rent to provide someone exclusive access to a property that I worked 20 years for to pay off plus 10 years to save for the down payment. Like, I’m just a wage slave myself and there’s literally over 250k of my own money in my house … why should I have to give that away for free? Seems to me that trying to take the fruits of my labor (i.e. the house that I worked for) for free is the thievery here.
FunkyStuff@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
It would be in your power to set the rent. If you set the rent at the cost of maintenance + any other recurring costs, then yes, it’s totally fair. If you set the rent such that you make a profit, you’d be earning money for doing nothing.
The property that you worked 20 years to pay off and 10 to pay the down payment for is yours, you get to keep it. You don’t have to give it away for free, you’ll either sell it for a fair price and keep that money, or your heirs will have it. All that the opponents of rentseeking and landlordism are asking for is that you not use the property to make profit between now and when you sell it or die.