No Stupid Questions

Owning your place to live should be a right. Anyone who holds more housing stock than they personally need and who will only let it out if there's profit on their investment (because if it's an investment, then there is an expectation that the line must always go up, which is also very inflationary), tightens the market and makes it harder for other people to become a home owner.

The big difference between renting and paying of a mortgage, is that by paying off the mortgage, the home owner has build up equity and secured a financially more secure future. But if someone is too poor to get a mortgage to afford the inflated house prices (inflated because other people treat it like an investment), then in the current system they pay rent to pay off the mortgage/debt of their landlord and after the renter has paid off their landlord's mortgage, they'll still be poor and without any equity themselves.

It's a very antisocial system. And with landlords building up more and more equity on the backs of people who are unable to build up equity themselves, there's a good reason why landlords are often said to be parasitic.

Yes all landlords.

I'd say the only ethical way to be a residential landlord is if you are renting out the only house you own because you aren't in a position to use it as a house - say you've brought a house, but had to move somewhere for a few years for work and intend to move back at some point.

The moment you own 2 houses, you are profiting from a system that only works because of inelastic demand - you could have put your money into the stock market and made it do something productive, but instead you are collecting rent, making it harder for others to meet their own basic needs, and profiting from a speculative bubble

I your Aunt and Uncle are probably lovely people. They're trying to survive in the same system we're all stuck in.

Ask yourself this, who is paying the mortgage on those properties? If the renters can afford the rent, they can afford the mortgage and then some. Your aunt and uncle, and all landlords, are collecting a premium on housing, what do they actually provide? If they're trying to save for retirement, by renting homes, who's actually paying for their retirement? Will those people be about to afford to retire if they're spending so much on rent? They'll end up with nothing when they leave. Your aunt and uncle will still have 3 to 5 extra properties.

They own suburban townhomes, in some cases you find a renter who'd rather not own a home. In most cases, the market has progressed to a point where home ownership is impossible because people are hoarding homes and withholding access for rent.

It's an unethical system. Your aunt and uncle are small line landlords and a symptom of a larger problem. They're participating in an unethical system to gain an advantage, and it's hard to blame them for that. That doesn't make it ethical, or good.

Jefferson said he "participated in a broken system that he hated." In reference to slavery. He actively tried to reform that system and was rebuffed. He's still seen as a slave holding landed gentry today, and it remains a black spot on his (admittedly spotty) legacy. How are the people who owned 3 to 5 slaves different from those who owned 50? How are they compared to those who could afford and benefit to own slaves, and still advocated for abolition?

If you make a profit for allowing another person shelter (particularly if you don't need that space for yourself and/or your own family), then you are a parasite.

Treating a basic human need as an investment is, and has always been, abhorrent. It has royally fucked over economics as a whole by making people's retirement funds dependent on housing costs going up infinitely.

I don't know if I'm leftist, but the US spectrum is well right of most of the world.

The question is multi-layered. Your aunt may or may not be a bad person, I don't know her. Them renting out property may or may not be for good reason, even if they're doing it to "survive" in the capitalistic economy.

The real issue is that capitalism itself is exploitative, and (depending on where you draw the line) participating may fall under being complicit.

My understanding of parasitism is extracting resources for their own benefit, with little to no benefit for the exploited/system.

The first hint of parasitism is amassing resources they aren't using for living. Your aunt and husband made surplus money to be able to afford buying the properties. Unless they did that by extracting resources, refining them, working them and making provisions for them to be recycled and ecologically compensated - others will have had to pay the cost. Either by working harder than them, or suffering more than them, for example due to an imbalance of ecology. This is one form of parasitism.

Another perspective of parasitism is inserting themselves as a middle party. Your aunt almost certainly isn't providing the housing at cost, where rent barely covers their labor and property upkeep. That means they are keeping someone from a home, unless they pay extra to your aunt. Just like a bully.

Now, this doesn't mean that your aunt has any malicious intent. The point is that the system itself is evil, like a pyramid scheme of bullies, where each layer extracts something from each underlying layer. This is useful for making ventures, but at the cost of ever increasing exploitation and misery. Especially when capitalists are allowed to avoid paying for restoring the exploited, or incentivised to do it more. I'm sure you've heard of enshittification.

Now, example time!

I'm sure you've thought that air is important for you to survive. And maybe you've ever worried that traffic or other pollution might make your air less good for you?

Enter the capitalist! For a small premium we'll offer your personalised air solution, a nifty little rebreather loaded with purified air you carry with you all day. The price is so reasonable as well, for only $1/day you can breathe your worries away!

Now, producing the apparatus means mining and logging upstream of your town, removing natural air filtering and permanently damaging your environment, but they only charge for the machines and labor. Restoration is Future You's problem. Selling and refilling the apparatus happens to also produce pollution, making the air worse for everyone. But that makes the apparatus more valuable! Price rises to $2/day.

Competitors arrive, some more successful than others, all leaving ecological devastation and pollution that can't be naturally filtered. Air gets worse. One brand rises to the top, air is more valuable and lack of competition makes it so that air is now $4/day.

Then an unethical capitalist figures that if we just make the air slightly worse, profits will go up! They don't want to be evil, but cutting corners when upgrading the production facility means the pollution gets worse. Other adjacent capitalists see that they also can pollute more without consequences. Air gets worse and price increases to 6$/day.

Air is starting to get expensive, rebreather sharing services, one-use air bottles, and home purifyers crop up, increasing pollution and raising costs, air is now $8/day for most people.

People start dying from poor air, new regulations on apparatus safety and mandatory insurance come up, driving prices further to $10/day. You now also need a spare apparatus and maintain it in case your main one breaks down.

Etc.

The point of the example is that through a series of innocuous steps, all making perfect sense within capitalism, you are now paying $300/month more to live than before capitalism, with little real benefit to you, and no real choice to opt out.

Each and every step is parasiting on your life, by requiring you to work harder for that money, and/or suffer more due to pollution and ravaged environment.

The only solution to not work/suffer into an early grave is to have others work on your behalf, perpetuating the parasitic pyramid scheme. This is where your aunt is, is she evil? Probably not. Is her being an active part of an evil system bad? Yes, yes it is. Capitalism bad.

Your Aunt sounds like she is working with the system we have. Lemmys heart is in the right place but practically speaking most of the vitriol you read on here would need a genie in a magic lamp to come true. We need to squeeze the top the hardest, not squeeze everyone with more than us.

Once they abolish people buying properties and parking them empty just to make money on the property value increasing, then they abolish corporations owning hundreds or thousands of houses while colluding to fix the rental market, then they abolish people buying family dwellings and turning them into airbnbs, then the property developers churning out acre upon acre of McMansions with zero affordable housing, then the foreign investors, then maybe listen to their criticism of mom and pop investors owning a handful of properties and making what is probably the safest and most lucrative investment honest hard working people can make.

When we say landlords are bad, it's not really about the individual people so much as it's about the system as a whole. Ideally, the human right to housing should be guaranteed for everyone, along with the right to be cared for in retirement. How many elderly people don't own their own homes, and have rent to pay as an additional expense making it harder for them to retire? Sure, landlordism can provide a source of income for people who can't work, but for every case of that, there's another case of someone who can't work who doesn't have the privilege of owning a home, such that the existing system makes them even more desperate. So logically, it doesn't really make sense as a justification.

Cases like this should be considered when we're looking at how best to implement our ideals, but not for determining our ideals in the first place. The just thing is that everyone should have a secure place to live. That's the ideal. In implementing that ideal, we should consider that houses currently are used as a form of investment and many people simply use them that way without a second thought, because of social norms. If we simply seized and redistributed everyone's properties tomorrow, some people like your aunt would be disproportionately affected, compared to if they had invested in stocks that can be just as unethical. It would probably still be better for most people than doing nothing, but we ought to craft policy in such a way that we're not trolley probleming it (except regarding the people at the very top, for whom it's unavoidable), but rather such that it provides benefits while harming as few people as possible.

When society is organized justly and the wealth of the people on the top is redistributed, there will be enough to go around that everyone ought to be able to benefit from it. Therefore, it shouldn't be a problem to compensate small landlords for their properties and ensure that they aren't harmed by any changes in policy.

As a guy who rented out one house for a very fair price i can tell you I'm the devil.

Typically small landlords (I was one) are not the problem, But they aren't making things any easier. They still take up houses that they don't need that should be on the market, and they charge about twice what thier mortgage rate is to renters, which then artifically inflates housing prices, while also restricting home inventory. People with a handful of properteries aren't really the main driver of the issues though. One corporate landlord with 500 properties would do much more damage, but they all harm the market to an extent.

Any landlord that uses a residential family home as an investment is a parasite.

If you want to invest in real estate, purchase commercial, retail, and industrial properties. Nobody needs those things to live. The reason why this is harder is that the companies who tenant these properties generally have the leverage and means to not get exploited (though some small businesses still do get exploited)

No.

I of course can't speak for anyone except myself, but for me, what your aunt is doing is what essentially capitalism is all about.

Its when those landlords get replaced by venture capital corporations and reits that it becomes a problem.

In your aunts case, the rent money stays local, contributes back to the local economy, etc...

In the case of venture capital and corporate ownership, the only goal is to increase a stock price for a corporation. None of that money gets returned to the local economy except for possibly hiring a local property management firm to handle things on the ground for them.

When capitalism remains about people, all of good. When corporations take the reins of ownership so their profit becomes the sole motive is when things go bad.

People who are renting out their basement or spare room are fine. They are living on their property and making space for someone else to live there as well.

Someone who owns property they do not live on, and are profiting off their renters just because their name is on the deed is the definition of parasitic behavior. There's a reason "rent seeking behavior" is a derogatory term.

Yes, but I don't blame the small ones for it.

If you can make a profit by hoarding properties and renting them out, then the system is broken.

The large ones are the ones lobbying for the systems to remain broken.

Especially those that own a couple houses as "investment". Housing should not be an investment. With the big companies you could argue at least that they are also building houses, which we need since the government wont build enough. Not saying they arent parasites either though.

When people said "slave owners are evil pieces of shit" do they also mean the people who only owned 1 or 2 to help out with the family, or only the large plantation owners?

Does your Aunt get paid rent from the people living in those houses? Is that rent more than it costs to own and maintain the properties? Yeah, thought so. Yes, your aunt is a parasite. She is extracting profit from other people simply by virtue of being the one to own the property that she doesn't live in. She isn't providing value, she's restricting access.

She may be a lovely lady the rest of the time, I'm sure she lives a vibrant and full life elsewhere, but that doesn't change what she's doing. Nobody owns "a couple of houses as an investment" if they're not making money off of them, and they're only making money by extracting it from the people who have to rent.

3-5 small houses to rent are still 3-5 small houses people who actually need it could be living in. So, yes, your aunt is a parasite.

Depends on the leftist, but generally I think hoarding land you're not personally using, especially during a housing crisis, is wrong.

I also think that charging rent from people to simply exist in a place you aren't using anyway is wrong. When she pays the mortgage she's buying equity, when they pay the rent they're buying jack shit. It's an enormous parasitic drain on the economy.

But I don't think she's, like, evil. Not the same way that major landlord companies are. And I understand the motivations. I still disagree with the methods, but until the great commie revolution/rapture (/s) comes we all have to engage with problematic capitalist systems to a greater or lesser extent.

Here's the thing: landlords make a profit, right? Where does that profit come from? There are better and worse landlords, but any time there's a profit there's money being taken away from people.

No one is coming after your aunt, but that's where it comes from. They're leaching money away from tenants. Some are worse than others, but it is by definition parasitic if you're making a profit and not providing a service.

As a leftist landlord, we mean all of them.

As an sp member in the UK I can give you the parties stance. We aren't going after small business. Your aunt while not giving to society and being a member of the owning class is more a symptom of capitalism and under a socialist programme she would not need to degrade others to live a fulfilling life. Dignity should be afforded to all but we also understand that material conditions govern us.

We go after bigger issues than your aunt.

Renting allows those without the needed capital to access a resource.

Backing out from that, one should question why shelter is a resource that someone cannot access on a minimum wage salary.

So, fundamentally, landlording isn't inherently evil, but it's presentation in the system is inherently corrupting. As in, at any moment that someone retains an excess of shelter they do not need, and instead rent it out, they are constraining the market for their own gain, at the detriment of others who in need shelter.

Next consider degrees of influence: large corporations buy up tons of units and exert inordinate power on the system. They systemically unbalance the purchasing ability of normal folk, due to process or sheer wealth. Fine, that's the high water of corruption. From there it's only shades of difference down to the mom and pop landlord. It's up to you to decide where they land on the scale.

Making money from merely owning things that others need and have to pay you to use as they can't get them otherwise (because you and people like you took them first) - something know in Economics as rent seeking, though it doesn't apply only to housing - is pure parasitism because that person is producing no value whatsoever, merely extorting money from others because they removed free access to a resource from them.

I can see the evil in what these large corporations are doing but I have rented in the past when I was neither prepared for the burden of home ownership nor planning to stay in that location for a long time. If I couldn't have rented what would I have done? I would have been essentially FORCED into owning a home or what, living in the streets? And what if you wish to move but no one wants to buy your house? More you are forced to stay out turn evil by buying two houses.

It's ok to love your aunt. She didn't make the rules she's just living by them. If there's a problem with the system, start at the top.

I rent out my upstairs. Should I kick them out? All of my tenants have loved me, I rarely raise rent, and include Internet and utilities. Nuance.

I reckon if you're doing the work involved in managing a rental property yourself, you're doing work and providing a service.

If you expect an employee/contractor to do all that for you, but to still collect profits: what would you say you do here?

I'm sure your aunt doesn't mean any harm, but she is still part of the problem. Those 3-5 properties are 3-5 fewer homes available to own for new families and are a small part of perpetuating the housing crisis.

Making money on the back of someone else with little to no work of yours is parasitic. Having enough money at one point in life to become a parasite doesn't change anything.

I'd say even your aunt is included in that. Don't worry though, my mom is on the same list. They're extracting wealth from someone else's labor.

Individual landlords can be the worst ones. Here’s what that often looks like:

1. individual inherits a home
2. they rent it out and quit their job
3. the rent is their only income so they are really cheap about maintenance and repairs
4. they make any repair the tenant’s “fault” and force them to pay for it
5. they raise the rent at every opportunity to the maximum the market will bear, because that is the only way their own income ever rises
6. they do repairs and maintenance themselves, even though they are unskilled, because that’s cheaper, and the quality of all the work is poor, using the cheapest materials possible (I once had a landlord paint our house puke orange because she got a deal on that awful paint).

Lots of good answers here, so here’s a fact that might help you understand why people have these positions:

Based on currently available numbers, there are about 31 vacant housing units for every homeless person in the U.S.

The worst thing about investment properties is that it raises for bar for entry into owning a home for others. Lets say someone started renting, got some capital together got a house paid it off through hard work. Kudos, thats cool. Then they buy a second house and use the rental income to pay the mortage or whatever. Over time buying more and more. Eventually it's not feasible for people starting out to do the same thing. The owners all own and have multiple streams of income, allowing them to own more and pay more. Pushing up prices and edging out new home owners. Go back 20-30 years and see the difference. It used to be possible for single income households to buy a house but not anymore. Shit, its getting to the point where dual income households are starting to struggle.

Then theres the airbnb effect. Some houses on airbnb and similar are close to the areas weekly rental price for a night. Even if its hald the weekly rental cost for a night, thats still less than 3 months they need to 'lease' out the house to break even with a tradional rental. Some places have absolutly shit rental access due to the abundance of short-term stays. This too, causes rental prices to increase.

Look at the homeless problem that is going on in most western natiions, this isn't the traditional homeless issue caused by drugs or debt or what ever bad outcomes there are. It's a supply issue, caused by too many houses in too few hands. You have working families living in cars or tents all because there is nowhere to live. Which again, leads to higher rental prices due to lack of supply.

Nobody should own more than one house, and if they do, the rent should not cost more, or even equal to a mortage on the house. Rentals should be stepping stones for people after they first move out of home, or seperate from a partner or move locations. They shouldn't be a thing that people have to live in all their lives.

Also, leftist.... ffs. grow up.

A couple of a house as an investment is already a lot, and way more than the average person can afford. If you go from a leftist perspective, the fact that they make money without workings sucks. These people who own a couple of house for investment are also the one complaining about "public retirement system is too expensive, so we should cut-down retirement benefit for everyone"

More seriously, I understand that you want to play by the rule in today's capitalist world. The problem is that in many places the rule are skewed. In some countries income from rent are less taxed than income from work, and the power-balance between tenant and landlord is favouring the landlord (and people see implementing stuff like rent-control and shorter notice for tenant as leftists policies). While it's fun to say eat the rich including the landlord, you need to build a reasonable political program if you want to stand a chance.

Another big issue, is the lack of affordable rental properties managed by the government/municipality. It's basically massively promoting either homelessness or bad housing

The only landlords I see that add any positive value to the world are those who run and maintain apartment complexes. If you own multiple single family homes to rent them out or hoard parcels of land just to try and sell for a higher price: you're a parasite.