Hundred percent. I have a personal ethos that believes profit from rent is amoral, but we could probably address housing concerns without meeting my personal ethics standards, which I freely admit are more extreme than most.
“profit from rent is amoral”. Care to elaborate on this? Does this ethical standard also extend to other human needs as well? For instance should farmers not be able to profit from providing food?
I feel like there's a difference between making a sustainable profit and squeezing every bit out of a trade or contract. I'm not as idealistic as GP, but think we should aim at improving things.
Markets and competition work really well on frontiers in a situation where basic things are covered, because like this more people can participate freely.
There are many things that we have figured out to a pretty high degree and that benefit from collaboration and (very) long term thinking. I think housing, transport, basic medicine/treatment and perhaps to some degree food and water belong to that category. You can always have the luxury/explorative version on top with markets and that model works pretty well where it is applied.
To contrast, if your under such financial stress so you constantly worry whether some big bill is coming your way or you cannot even afford the very basics, then your stuck in a perpetual loop. Landlords, collectors and even police come knocking. It takes a lot of courage, discipline and enough luck and stamina to get out of this. In my opinion this is a a monumental task and effort _wasted_ on a inefficient and short sighted system of power relations.
A farmer and a landlord are different things. My family are farmers, I've been a landlord.
(FWIW, before anyone calls me a hypocrite, I paid back every renter every penny of profit I made from them plus appreciation.)
The labor that the farmer puts in should absolutely be rewarded. But the labor of a farmer is absolutely nothing like a landlord who makes money purely because they had enough money to buy housing. Plenty of landlords hire property management firms, and do little to no labor at all, but still make a profit.
That modality doesn't exist in farming and food the same way it does in housing today.
Why should labor be rewarded but not capital? Seems like an arbitrary distinction. Does your family allow anyone to farm and extract value from their land? No? Then they're no different than a landlord.
People mischaracterize the ease in which landlords make money. Take the past two years and eviction moratoriums for example. Landlords in the United States in many areas had to allow tenants to rent without being able to remove them for non-payment.
Landlords inherently have to be well capitalized in order to properly maintain the house as most individuals are not experts in all trades.
>before anyone calls me a hypocrite, I paid back every renter every penny of profit I made
I wouldn't have called you a hypocrite even if you didn't pay back anything. Living in the real world™ doesn't mean you can't criticise it. If we can't challenge things we take part in, how do we improve anything?
> purely because they had enough money to buy housing
The nominal assumption is that they must have earned that by providing someone with something of value to them. The money they receive is a formal/cultural recognition of their indebtedness -- that they have provided something useful but have not receive anything of material value in return. Money is a way of claiming something useful in return for something they had provided, but separated in time and place.
Of course this is the theoretical and intended mechanism. It does get subverted in many ways when one earns money without providing anyone with anything materially useful. Inheritance can be interpreted as one such. Although it can be interpreted charitably too -- dont compensate me for the goods and services I provided , I am dead, compensate Saul instead.
This really is wrong. There's so many contracts the landlord has to keep up with, and pay, the council on various cases like rates, water, upkeep of lawns or council will and bill, keeping up with changing building codes and rules such a fire alarms which update every x years, then insurances, then maintenance of the house structure, the plumbing, electrical .. as well as that the 'money' represents their savings from other work they did. It's serious job and you're not seeing the reality of it if you think the landlord does nothing but profit. It's a bloody business, with work, responsibilities and risks, and if everything goes well the expectation of a profit but not the guarantee. It's also a business that provides significant real value to people - a modern house has so many features and meets so many beauracratic and safety rules beyond just a roof over your head.
Living in a teepee is looking more attractive by the day haha.
This is just handwaving voodo - we expect better on hackernews.
Reality is landlords are in all different situations, some have spare money above costs of interest, rates, insurances, rental agent fees, etc etc and can use that to pay for maintenance. Many are putting in their own money to pay for maintenance, the same way they put in their own money to afford the deposit and purchase costs.
And when there's a problem a landlord can't just ring the first inflate-a-quote contractor and open up the unlimited checkbook you seem to be ascribing to them, they will be bankrupt very quickly if they did. Instead, they have to assess the issue, try to find a economical solution, get multiple quote and spend time finding a contractor who can do it reasonably well the first time at an affordable cost. That is not the same work as a farmer, but it sure is work. If it's not done the house quickly becomes unlivable with a broken toilet or whatever and being unlivable is also unrentable and produces no value to anyone. It's work, and it's important to keep the house functioning.
Really as you seem to think landlords do nothing but profit, similar to gnomes and underpants, perhaps you should give it a try yourself. If nothing else it will be quite a learning opportunity!
Yes, they use the money in order to maintain the house. Furthermore owner-occupancy is a thing, where the landlord does some maintenance themselves.
However no matter what, no landlord can maintain all aspects of the house alone. You think a single person can be a master of all trades and have all equipment on hand all of the time in an apartment, for instance?
Why does it even matter if someone pays others to maintain the house? Do you think there are people who build modern houses alone with no machinery?
Because homes are overpriced, because they're treated as capital instead of a durable good & because all financial / building policy advantages existing homeowners
