Submitted 9 hours ago by shadysus@lemmy.ca to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
They should be known as criminals, as it should be illegal for companies to own residential property. It should also be illegal for any individual or partners to own more than 2 properties.
The housing crisis will never end unless limits are imposed on the ownership of the finite resource.
I agree! Its shouldn’t be legal to have houses as investments.
Such an extremist take is difficult to implement in practice. A healthy rental market gives significant power to the potential renters. Key word: healthy.
Low income housing can get taken over by the state but that’s not the only section of the market. White collar workers have also seen an increase in their mobility, for example.
Also, a lot of people explicitly do not want to own their home as that requires a lot of work to maintain it that is hugely expensive if you can’t do it yourself. I do however agree that “house scalpers” should receive a guillotine haircut for free.
In Germany they are called “Heuschrecken” which translates to “Locusts” because thats how they operate.
Only in german: de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuschreckendebatte
This is what librewolf translated the first section to:
A locust debate in Germany in April and May 2005 over a statement by the then SPD chairman Franz Müntefering is referred to as a locust debate. This compared the economic action of some “anonymous investors” with locust plagues.
The term “locust” has since been regarded in German political parlance as a derogatory animal metaphor for private equity companies and other forms of equity participation, such as in the public-private partnership model, with allegedly short-term or excessive return expectations, such as hedge funds or so-called vulture funds.
The term and debate have been criticized variously, including as in parts anti-Semitic and anti-American.
In spain we call those companies “fondos buitre” (vulture founds)
We’ll fix those greedy bastards! Just like we did with Ticketmaster! What? We didn’t?
Homephiles
Company ownership of housing seemed to work fine in Germany, and is significantly better than non-professional landlords who will see to your faulty boiler or tap in 2-7 business months.
High housing costs are mainly due to one thing: lack of housing. That is caused by not building enough houses, or not filling the ones you do have (e.g. because they are Airbnbs and are vacant most of the time). For companies to cause problems they have to buy so many homes they can abuse their market share by forcing rents up, which you would see as an increasing vacancy rate. As far as I know this has not been happening.
For companies to cause problems they have to buy so many homes they can abuse their market share by forcing rents up
Not necessarily. Your option only applies to non-necessities. For a necessity, all you need is to own enough of the industry, that you’re the only option for some people. If there only exists enough housing to just barely house everyone who needs a home, then you could own only 1%, and set the price to whatever you want, because someone will have to live there. Everywhere else is occupied.
which you would see as an increasing vacancy rate
Again, this only applies to non-necessities. If you hike the price of food, people aren’t gonna stop eating.
Yeah if you literally only 100%, or close to it, of housing in a city, that’s true. But no company does in anywhere I’m aware of. There are cases of massive consolidation but the largest competitor acquires like 17% of housing. There are also always some vacant houses even if that number is very low.
Housing is a necessity but there is still some elasticity. People can move in with parents, move to a cheaper region unaffected by the attempted market abuse, share with more people, live in their car or literally be out on the streets. All of those options (none of them good ones) mean that some people will not pay the higher rents if there’s an attempted squeeze - some houses would stand vacant. (Or: stand vacant for longer).
This is not a defence of free market economics in housing; I think local authorities should heavily invest in social housing. I just don’t think that we have any evidence of the high cost of housing being due to excessive company involvement in housing. We are seeing housing crises across the western world in all sorts of cities and all sorts of distributions of ownership.
Yeah no. Last i checked there are 4 times as many empty apartments than homeless people in Germany. The housing market here is completely fucked and corporate housing ownership needs to be disincentivized or outright banned for this to be solved. Whenever people try to buy housing they will be outbid by companies that already have plenty of capital. This leads to an everlasting spiral where the rich people will always have more buying power and normal people are perpetually stuck paying absurd rents to those same rich people.
But the vacancy rate is not shooting up; it’s steady/decreasing: https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/31454.jpeg
I can’t find any good data on corporate versus individual ownership.
Whenever people try to buy housing they will be outbid by companies that already have plenty of capital. This leads to an everlasting spiral where the rich people will always have more buying power and normal people are perpetually stuck paying absurd rents to those same rich people making them even richer.
How is this different when every house for rent is owned by an individual? They have the exact same incentive to charge high rents.
“Organised crime”
Guillotine baiters
flippers, but companies
You’re being nice
no, it would be people that are flipping homes, using low interest loans either from exploiting thier children(adult) to do it, and flipping it for more. it can be a person besides a company. i once followed a yottber that did this in vegas, what a cringe individuals they become.
SpicyTaint@lemmy.world 31 minutes ago
People who run said companies should be scalped.