Comment on Rent is theft
Flauschige_Lemmata@lemmy.world 1 week ago
If you all think landlords make that much money, why don’t you guys all get together and form a housing association? In fact there are plenty of housing associations that sell shares.
With building and repair costs at an all time high, being a landlord isn’t as profitable as it used to be.
And the high interest rates make it even less profitable. It’s more attractive to invest elsewhere. And impossible to pay off a mortgage with rent.
If more people were able to build apartments, we would be able to reduce the housing shortage and rent would go down.
The one thing landlords do that I would consider theft is lobbying (bribing) for NIMBY policies. Especially zoning laws.
Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Even with repairs and maintenance at an all time high a majority of rent is profit, either for the landlord if they own it outright or a bank if there’s a mortgage on it. The fact that a majority of the money being paid for housing isn’t going into building or maintaining housing and is going into the pockets of landlords, banks, mortgage backed securities holders is the main reason housing costs so much.
This is why the best solution to housing affordability is social/public housing. If you remove the profit motive and make it so all the money going into the housing system is spent on building or maintaining housing, then more homes would get built because there would be more money for them and you remove the rentier class constantly lobbying against new buildings to preserve property values.