cross-posted from: https://lemmy.crimedad.work/post/12162
Why? Because apparently they need some more incentive to keep units occupied. Also, even though a property might be vacant, there’s still imputed rental income there. Its owner is just receiving it in the form of enjoying the unit for himself instead of receiving an actual rent check from a tenant. That imputed rent ought to be taxed like any other income.
landlords don’t build housing
They pay for it to be built. Unless you think the workers should work for free and not receive any benefit from their labor. Does hexbear know you feel this way? 🤣
Landlords don’t pay for buildings to get built, the renters ultimately do. Landlords are just middlemen.
Landlords pay up front (directly or via a loan, which the renters presumably cannot get) and assume the risk of vacancies and repairs. If landlords ceased to exist, how do you propose new housing stock be created? Should the government be your landlord?
And then they get bailed out by the government when their risk blows up.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/landlords-were-never-meant-to-get-bailout-funds-many-got-it-anyway-11590494400
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/blog/four-reasons-landlords-should-take-advantage-federal-rental-assistance/
And they have little to no risk in the first place because the market has such high demand that they can pretty much instantly fill vacancies, and they barely do repairs if at all. And at least where I live, renters are required to have/pay for renters insurance which further drives down the landlord’s risk. And on top of all that, they have security deposits to lower their risk even further. They don’t take on any meaningful risk.
Government investment into housing development (which then turn into market rate housing/co-ops), zoning fixes, and a LVT is the solution. The builders get paid, home ownership becomes affordable, the risks are dealt with, and renters aren’t being priced gouged. It would also do wonders to help fix the homelessness crisis.
And none of it needs the government to own your home.
You can’t be serious? Let’s review.
By who…? Come on, be honest, who do you think is going to do this 🤣
That allow who to build more housing?
Is literally what the West has right now.
We have these now.
This is a fine step. Most states have property taxes now that include the land that a rental sits on.
If you can’t pay for your own housing, your choices are either for the government to pay for it, or for the private sector to pay for it. In either event the entity that owns your house, that isn’t you, is your landlord. If you can’t pay for your own housing, and you don’t want the private sector or the government to provide it for you, then you’re homeless.
It was implied, but I later edited my comment, the government should do so. We have a massive housing crisis on our hands and there needs to be a solution. The government is so bloated that there is easily already the money somewhere to divert to something actually worthwhile.
Private developers, individual citizens, the government itself, etc. Anybody and everybody with a willingness to build a house should be able to do so without dealing with the ridiculous zoning laws we have now.
We have market-rate housing and co-ops at such a low rate. We need a massive increase in quantity. The private sector won’t do this because there is no profit motive, so it largely has to be the government who is building these. But once their built it shouldn’t be the government who owns it, it should be the co-ops, market-rate housing orgs, or literally individual citizens who own the housing,
I don’t want property taxes. Those need to be removed along with all other types of taxation. The only valid type of taxation should be land value tax, and a carbon emission tax. A property tax punishes a land owner for developing their land and using it more efficiently. A land value tax on the other hand incentivizes more effective use. It’s a massive topic and a massive difference. If you want to learn more I would recommend looking into georgism.
I disagree with your definition.
Ah God, I was wondering (cheering for) when you’d make the turn to “politically only possible with a socialist government” or something along those lines, but now I see you’re one of the famed georgists. First I’ve seen in the wild!
If you have a criticism of georgism I’d love to hear it, because so far I’ve heard basically none. And I don’t think I would go quite so far as to call myself a georgist. It’s only something I learned about relatively recently, but the more I learn about it the better it sounds than the current dog shit we are dealing with that we somehow call a tax system. Is georgism perfect? Almost certainly not, but it’s a massive step in the right direction.
You are correct in that the solution to the housing crisis is only possible with a socialist government. Socialism and georgism are not mutually exclusive.
If you want to argue that it is a valid use of the state to produce low cost housing then this is an interesting conversation. But much of the rest of your response is nonsense. For instance -
You’re going to fund all the social programs of a modern government via, essentially, no taxes? Come on. If you want the government to provide a robust social safety net, including housing, you’ll be looking at Nordics level taxation.
You can be wrong if you want to be.
No, it would be funded through land value and carbon taxes. Those two tax types should be the only valid form of taxation. We should still have enough tax to pay for it (after we ditch the bloat our government has. Example).
People always complain about such a system but they actually have healthcare, so seems like a moot point to me.
First off, there’s no need to be a dick about it. Second, that definition says person, whereas you said entity.
“In either event the entity that owns your house, that isn’t you, is your landlord.”
“a person who rents land, a building, or an apartment to a tenant.”
You’re the one person I hope becomes homeless
Don’t waste your breath, if anything Lemmy is somehow less financially literate than reddit.
You’re describing a developer. Most landlords aren’t developers.
And yes, the government should take on the role of developing residential properties and ensuring everyone has access to them. Housing is not a commodity, it’s a basic human need.
not to mention, many big developers aren’t paying cash to construct housing. they get a loan or establish a line of credit with or brokered via investors/banks/funds. the first rule of doing anything under capitalism is to use somebody else’s money to do it, and all those loans drawing on lines of credit ultimately leads back to the central bank anyway.
it’s a massive shell game to obscure the fact that workers do all the work to create the products and services and then have to pay their shitty wages right back to access the very things they create, just so maybe 2-3 million megarich assholes can roll around in piles of money and make an income for doing literally nothing.
landlords are among the most nakedly parasitic sectors of society, and even then we still get bootlicking bozos pretending they “provide” housing or are somehow responsible for the community infrastructure that makes living in the place where the house exists desirable.
Food is also a basic human need, and markets seem to work well-enough for that. The core difference is that, while we have an extreme abundance of food to the point of waste, cities have been underbuilding housing for decades and there are far more people wanting to move to them than available housing units, so only the richest people get the housing. This puts a lot of positive pressure on housing prices
That’s because it is easy to compete to sell food. Housing doesn’t work that way.
It’s not just cities, but I otherwise agree.
Agreed, but there’s a lot that could be done to make it much much easier. For nearly a century, housing policy has been explicitly designed to make housing a productive asset for investment, which is a goal that’s fundamentally opposed to housing being affordable.
Agreed. Housing is a right, a basic necessity, not an investment vehicle.
Oh the risk! Well sure that entitles them to take money from people who actually work. Go find a landlord and
of course they do. we actually understand that production doesn’t require middle men. we’re communists, fool.
No they usually don’t pay for anything to be built. Even if they did, they just pay for it with other peoples labor (their renters)
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Because you don’t seem to be connecting the points together. Lead a horse to water but can’t force it to drink kinda situation.
Landlords didn’t do anything but have capital. Workers built the damn thing.
That’s the water I was talking about.
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smh at the products of the American school system
you’re replying to someone who said landlords are unnecessary middlemen in the construction of housing. your mocking analogy is “people buying things with credit cards”. do you not see how funny a self-own that is?
the landlords are the credit cards in your analogy. people bought things before credit cards existed. people built housing before landlords existed. landlords are as necessary to the building of housing as credit cards are to the buying of toilet paper.
tho I wouldn’t be surprised if you thought Buttcoin was necessary for cleaning your shitty ass.
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