this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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We'd have a lot of empty houses and maybe cheaper houses.
Look. Personally, I love renting. Its fleksible.i can move whenever i want to and not think about selling. Also i can live in places where houses are practically unsellable and not worry that I can't sell once I want to live somewhere else
Also, I don't have to worry about repairing and maintaining the house. If I window breaks, I call the landlord. If a pipe breaks a leak, I call the landlord. For me, renting is great!
We would also get lots of empty houses by killing 20% of the poorest people. What's the point of arguments like this?
You'd like that, wouldn't you? They don't "produce enough value" for your tastes and deserve their suffering, so why not end it?
Buying and selling houses is a nightmare to make you feel like rentals are necessary.
When my parents wanted to move as young adults it was easy for them to sell their property and use that money to buy a new one in the place they were moving to. That's now way more difficult just for the benefit of landlords.
When I was four (in 1986), my parents moved for my Dad's job (he was transferred), and ended up accepting the company offer to buy their house at not a great price because they couldn't find a market buyer. At least from my experience, buying and selling forty years ago was just as fraught as now.
Do you have examples of specific practices that have become common and make house sales more difficult?
Housing should not be a speculative asset in the first place. Houses are for living in- and before you tell me about how they are a valuable store of wealth, you shouldn't need to do that either to get by. Your net worth and therefore your class standing should not be a factor in whether you can have access to the basics of life. That's why it's called capital-ism, because everything revolves around capital. It's designed to self-perpetuate by exploiting the inequalities it produces. There are other ways of life, and they aren't as pie-in-the-sky as they would seem. You just have to get out of the capitalist frame of mind to understand how they work and what exactly is holding us back from achieving them.
I agree with everything you wrote up to the point of claiming all the US housing problems are inherent to capitalism. Japan is a capitalist country, but Japanese houses are for living in, and Japanese houses depreciate like cars - which is way more sustainable than the US train wreck. There are other ways of housing even without leaving capitalism.
This is almost entirely not due to policies but almost entirely to Japanese economy being stagnant for the last 20 years whereas the US economy has grown almost every year for the last 20 years.
I also live in a stagnant country, and it's not great that you have to sell the house you bought 10 years ago with the same price or cheaper to get it off your hands. And also it's not great that the general wealth in the society is not growing.
When people from where I live visit USA, even when they go to not so rich states, they notice that everything and everyone is more wealthy.
I think the biggest issue is that the price of homes proportional to income isn't what it used to be. And that causes things to keep getting worse.
Homes cost more and people have less money so less homes are sold. This allows institutional investors to buy up larger portions of the available housing, and they prefer to rent those out.
So that along with other factors makes home prices keep going up causing less people to be able to buy. People being forced to pay a larger portion of their income to housing causes the spiral to get worse and creeps into other industries that people won't patronize if they need to save money.
Landlordss being allowed free reign historically does this to countries. It happend in England and China and probably a lot more countries i am ignorant about.
Neighborhoods fighting densification tooth and nail make housing scarce, and people who want housing having to outbid each other for (proportional to population) fewer and fewer houses makes them unreasonably, unsustainably expensive. Which attracts investors and adds icing to the problem, but at root it's the homeowners who got theirs and then pulled up the ladder after driving the scarcity of housing in the locations where people want to live.
If people demanded governments really invest in densification and new houses where the jobs are - including sharply limiting the ability of noisy impacted neighbors to drag the process out - the availability of houses would force prices down, which would cause the predatory investors to lose interest and add icing in the other direction, to affordability.
Here I'm responsible for all that. Renting is not so great... lol
I'd be happy to rent if the value of houses didn't double every decade.
Here in Australia you really just work so you can pay your mortgage. The wealth you accrue through your life is mostly the value of your house rather than the money you save.
Of course. Why would we work so hard to keep jobs that most of us hate if we didn't have mortgages and rent to pay? This is how the machine keeps itself turning. If only there was a motor that wasn't so exploitative in nature...
@cosmicrookie @stabby_cicada you could still have rental houses in a system with no landlords
@cosmicrookie @stabby_cicada I mean for example with housing cooperatives
Okay, but then you still do need to worry about eating the loss of property with little to no value remaining. The Cooperative is a group of people living there and owning the homes via very large loans which do not disappear when you no longer wish to live there. Depending on the co-ops terms you might get straddled with debt even if you leave. In the worst case, if you're the last one out and the debt does transfer to remaining owners then you get stuck with many tens of thousands of dollars debt.
In examples like China, where they executed landlords en masse to forcefully redistribute land, ended up just falling back on the landlord property rental structure exactly the same as before.
Just imagine paying the half of it, for supporting local workers for maintenance and fixups instead of a random nobleman's holidays in paradise...
wow look at mister lives in the good part of town over here where landlords pick up the phone
Government housing
Have you seen what that looks like in the US? It ain’t pretty or comfortable.
That’s like buying something that’s “military grade” thinking it’s good. It’s not.
I grew up in a government subsidized co-op, and I loved it. It's still going, and some of the rents are as low as $8/mo.
Government/public housing can be good. You just need to protect it.
I already was born unlucky enough to not be rich. What are the chances of being lucky enough to get one of those subsidized co-op homes?
Where I live, affordable housing is distributed on a lottery system. So I mean literally, what are the chances one has to obtain such housing? I can't imagine there are enough homes for every applicant.
The earlier you apply the better your chances. Just call up your city and enquire about applying. If you qualify, they might get back to you next year, or in five years. But they'll definitely never get back to you if your name isn't on the list. Anyway, people move out all the time -- when their luck turns and they decide they want a house, or need to move for work. My parents moved out.
My parents were on the list for less than a year before we got in. We were poor as fuck. I'm talking trip to the steel dump for my birthday kind of poor. So your luck can turn around if you try sometimes.
Yeah lol why would anybody pay inflated prices for a house if government housing was just as good. It's not the government that's your problem, it's the owning class that makes the rules with a vested interest in making sure a) public resources don't compete with private profit and b) workers have to keep working to survive (which also generates private profit)
Look at the public housing in singapore. Shit's awesome. You're telling me the wealthiest nation on the planet can't pull that off? I call bullshit.
Sounds a little ironic in a solarpunk sub but works as a measure in the economic system we live in today I suppose.
My brother in Christ you're the one paying for those repairs and more yourself, it's not like the landlord does it personally. Some might to save a buck, but you're still paying the bill.
Oh and all those repairs are tax deductible so they will pay less than you will on taxes usually.
Oh and if they would have to pay taxes, you're paying the taxes for them.
This is how everything you buy works. When you buy bread from the store you're paying more than it costs to make.
My point is, that I am willing to pay the landlord, to handle these responsibilities and risks
Edit: and inconvenience
Saying that you add nuance with that comment, is like saying anti-vaxers add nuance with their views.
It is proven time and time again that when something is done against landlords the normal people benefit. See Vienna for example, or the early ccp or the whole movement of and views of Henry George.
You can also see full video about the topic in Britain here