Memes @lemmy.ml

11mo ago

Just sayin

248 comments

No one gets a second home until everyone has their first.
- Rental has its place, there have been plenty of occasions in my life where rental suited me better than ownership. Regulation and enforcement of said regulations would do a lot to protect people in this situation.
  
  Rent apartments. Own houses.
  *Since some people really need every combination addressed: Rent/own apartments. Own houses.
  
  Rental property should be publicly owned. Landlords shouldn’t be a thing.
  I can see there being exceptions if you say own a property but have to move swiftly elsewhere and can’t/don’t wish to sell it, in such a case letting it out makes sense.
  
  Dude from Ukraine was telling me that most people own condos. He was weirded out that the vast majority of people in the US don't have a vested interest into their neighborhood simply because they believe they won't live there for long.
  
  So have apartments operated by the government with strict regulations.
- People who own second and third homes aren't even the issue. It's mega corps that literally own tens of thousands of homes each. A better way to go about it is to just progressively tax people more per home. That second home gets taxed at the same rate but any home after is taxed way way way more. If someone can still afford it then that's fine, just more tax money coming in. That and don't let corps own rental properties.
  
  Nope, I said what I said. No one needs a second home. Lots of people need a first.
  
  In Texas, your property tax is already somewhat two tiered. Your first home is taxed as a homestead and you get an exemption on part of the property tax. If you own a second, third, etc you have to pay the full amount and the annual increases are not capped. Im not 100% sure on the specifics as I don't own more than 1 though.
  
  basically tax it so much that anything beyond a third home is impossible to generate income from.
  
  Logarithmic scale of increasing property tax rate
  
  We already do this with a homestead exemption in Texas. Problem is, all the rent houses don’t qualify for the tax break, so the tax burden is passed on to the renter market / the tenants.
- Yup. Housing is for people to live in, not for speculation.
- How would you move? Need to time the buying and selling just right?
  
  Surely in the 21st century we can engineer a system in which the moving party is allowed a time period to settle in and sell the old property. We must have the technology and manpower to do this meagre task.
  
  Just have a government agency be a middle man.

Posted in a Canadian channel before, because I am Canadian:
The housing crisis arises out of one problem, and one problem only:
Housing as an investment.
That’s not to say foreigners are to blame - at less than 2% of the market, they don’t have any real impact. British Columbia’s laws against foreign home ownership is nothing more than a red herring, a bullshit move designed to flame racism and bigotry. Yes, some of them are just looking to build anchors in a prosperous first-world country, but most are honest buyers.
A better move has been the “speculation tax”. By taxing more heavily any home that remains empty, it encourages property holders to actually rent these units out, instead of holding out for people desperate enough to pay their nosebleed-high rents.
But all of this misses the real mark: housing used purely as investment.
Now, to be absolutely clear, I am not talking about landlords who have a “mortgage helper” suite, or who have held on to a home or two that they previously lived in. These are typically the good landlords that we need - those with just two or three rental units, and that aren’t landlording as a business, just as a small top-up to their day job or as an extra plump-up to the retirement funds they are living off of. By having many thousands of separate landlords instead of one monolith, healthy competition is preserved.
No, there are two types of “investors” that I would directly target:
Flippers
Landlords-as-a-business.
1) Flippers
The first group, flippers, also come in two distinct types:
Those that buy up homes “on spec” before ground has even been turned, and then re-sell those same homes for much more than they bought shortly before these homes are completed. Sometimes for twice as much as they paid.
Those that buy up an older, tired home, slap on a coat of paint, spackle over holes in the walls, paper over the major flaws in hopes that inspectors don’t catch them, and shove in an ultra-cheap but shiny Ikea kitchen that will barely last a decade, then re-sell it for much more than they paid for it.
Both of these groups have contributed to the massive rise in housing purchase prices over the last thirty years. For a family that could afford a 3Bdrm home in 2000, their wages have only increased by half again, while home values have gone up by five times by 2023.
And this all comes down to speculation driving up the cost of homes.
So how do we combat this? Simple: to make it more attractive for owner-occupiers to buy a home than investors.
A family lives in a home that they own for an average of 8 years. Some less, most a lot more. We start by taxing any home sale at 100% for any owner who hasn’t lived in said home as their primary residence for at least two years (730 contiguous days). We then do a straight line depreciation from the end of the second year down to 0% taxation at the end of the eighth year. Or maybe we be kind and use a sigmoid curve to tax the last two years very minimally.
Exceptions can exist, of course, for those who have been widowed, or deployed overseas, or in the RCMP and deployed elsewhere in Canada, or where the house has been ordered to be sold by the court for divorce proceedings, and so forth. But simple bankruptcy would not be eligible, because it would be abused as a loophole.
But the point here is that homes will then become available to those working-class people who have been desperate to get off of the rental merry-go-round, but who have been unable to because home prices have been rising much faster than their down payment ever could.
This tax would absolutely cut investors off at the knees. Flippers would have to live in a home much, much longer, and spec flippers would be put entirely out of business, because they can’t even live in that house until it is fully completed in the first place.
2) Landlords-as-a-business
The second group is much simpler. It involves anyone who has ever bought a home purely to rent it back out, seeking to become a parasite on the backs of working-class Canadians in order to generate a labour-free revenue stream that would replace their day job. Some of these are individuals, but some of these are also businesses. To which there would be two simple laws created:
It would become illegal for any business to hold any residential property whatsoever that was in a legally habitable state. This wouldn’t prevent businesses from building homes, but it would prevent a business from buying up entire neighbourhoods just to monopolize that area and jack up the rent to the maximum that the market could bear.
Any individual owning more than 5 (or so) rental units (not just homes!) would be re-classified as operating as a business, and therefore become ineligible to own any of them - they would have to immediately sell all of them.
As for № 2, a lot of loopholes can exist that a sharp reader would immediately identify. So we close them, too.
Children under 24 “operate as a business” automatically with any rental unit. They are allowed ZERO. Because who TF under the age of 25 is wealthy enough to own rental units? No-one, unless these units were “gifted” to them from their parents, in an attempt to skirt the law. So that is one loophole closed.
Additional immediate family members are reduced by half in the number of rental units they can own. So if a husband has the (arbitrary, for the sake of argument) maximum limit of five, the wife can only have two herself. Any other family member who wants to own a rental unit, and who does not live in the same household, must provide full disclosure to where their money is coming from, and demonstrate that it is not coming from other family members who already own rental units.
By severely constraining the number of investors in the market, more housing becomes available to those who actually want to stop being renters. Actual working-class people can exit the rental market, reducing demand for rental units, and therefore reducing rental prices. These lower rental prices then make landlording less attractive, reducing the investor demand for homes and reducing bidding wars by deep-pocketed investors, eventually reducing overall home values for those who actually want to buy a home to live in it.
Plus, landlords will also become aware of the tax laid out in the first section that targets flippers. If they own rental units that they have never lived in as their primary residence, they will also be unable to sell these units for anything other than a steep loss. They will then try to exit the market before such a tax comes into effect, flooding the market with homes and causing prices to crash. They know that they are staring down two massive problems:
Being stuck with a high-cost asset (purchase price) that only produces a low-revenue stream because renters have exited the market by buying affordable homes, allowing plenty of stock that is pincered by the spec tax that heavily taxes empty rental units, thereby lowering rental prices well beneath the cost of the mortgage on the unit.
By putting these two tools into effect at the same time, we force a massive exodus of landlords out of the marketplace, crashing home values to where they become affordable to working-class people, thereby massively draining the numbers of renters looking for places to rent. Those places still being rented out - by owners who have previously lived in them, or by investors who couldn’t sell in time - would significantly outnumber renters looking for a place to rent, thereby crashing rental prices as renters could then dictate rents by being able to walk away from unattractive units or abusive landlords.
Full disclosure: I own, I don’t rent. But I have vanishingly little sympathy for greed-obsessed parasites that suck the future out of hard-working Canadians who must pay 60% or more of their wages for shitbox rentals to abusive landlords in today’s marketplace. Most people (and pretty much anyone under the age of 30) who don’t already own no longer have any hope of ever owning a house, as their ability to build a down payment shrinks every year, while home values accelerate into the stratosphere.
- Creating massive penalties equal to the whole cost of a house for anyone that sells after less than 6-8 years would have devastating unintended consequences. It might make flipping impractical, but it would also hurt a lot of people who find themselves in a position where they need to sell, and would increase the risks associated with buying a house for lower income buyers.
  It would help if you targeted the profit from the sale instead of the whole price. Flipping is about buying low, minimizing the cost of improvements, and then selling for a massively inflated amount. Without that profit it's not worth it. For a normal person, being able to make money on the deal is nice, but at least recouping your costs can keep you economically stable and allow you to move on with your life.
  I also think that you would want to combine this with some plan for helping low income buyers with the restoration of neglected properties that would normally be snatched up by flippers.
  I also think the arbitrary age restriction on owning a rental property needs an exemption for inherited properties if nothing else. A 20ish year old who inherits a home or rental property when their parent(s) die is not abusing a loophole, and immediately hitting them with additional legal problems and forcing them to sell a house that has a tenant already in there is just unnecessary chaos for everyone involved.
  I'm also curious how large apartment complexes fit into this plan. Are they also banned? Do you just need an owner to occupy a (potentially much nicer) apartment in the building? If you can still operate a huge apartment complex, I would expect the market to shift heavily towards those. If you can't well, that raises it's own issues around urban housing and population density.
  
  In Switzerland we have a tax when selling a house on the value it gained since you bought it. So if you buy a house for price X and you sell it for more than that, you will be taxed on the price difference. Even if the price difference is just because of market fluctuations.
  This is probably a better solution against flippers, since only those making money by increasing house values are taxed. The tax can then be made more or less aggressive as needed.
  Edit: here are some more explanations about how this tax works https://www.ch.ch/en/housing/homeownership/taxation-of-real-estate#are-you-planning-to-sell-your-house-or-apartment
- That's a quality rant, I love it! The other guy had a point about zoning to allow greater density, but I think that's a separate but related issue.
  Obviously these will never come to pass while your leaders are all landlords, though
- I can't find the video, but the YouTube channel Oh the Urbanity! Did a pretty well explanation to why housing is so costly on Canada and the main problem is actually zoning laws. Like in 99% in Canada you can't built anything but single family detached houses.
- Love this write up! Thank you for posting, I really like your ideas. Out of curiosity how would apartment buildings work in your plan. There are many cities where you probably don't want to encourage single family homes to reduce urban sprawl. How would you encourage high density housing in your plan?
  
  Apartments can either be owned by families that upgraded to a house, and are now renting it out, or it can go full social housing where it follows the same model as Vienna, for example.
  You need administration to manage an apartment or any physically combined housing, but nothing says that the building itself or the underlying land needs to be owned by a corporation. In fact, true social housing is “owned” by the people, the rent you pay is just for upkeep and to pay off a very long term cost-of-construction bill. Some families in Vienna’s social housing pay less than 20% of their income on rent. You get in young enough, and you’re paying a pittance by the time you retire.
- I did not read all of this yet. But I always agreed with you on that housing as an investment was the crux of the problem, I just never knew exactly how to tackle it. Your write-up is great, and even if there are many issues that could arise from some of the implementation ideas, it's an amazing beginning to a conversation we should have been having for at least decades.
  Thank you very much! I will save this comment to come back to often.
- This would get messy with inheritances. So if you own and a family member passes away, you'd have to either move into that home for two years or it would be worthless to sell? That's going to create some perverse incentives regarding old folks and housing.
  Related to why someone under 25 might own a rental unit.
  Also, would this apply to non residential rental properties?
  
  This would get messy with inheritances.
  So make this an exception, on the condition that the child can be classified as an adult by the courts.
  And if it’s someone under 25, there is a high likelihood that they’re still living at home and have already occupied the home for some time already. The passing of the parents would have triggered an insurance payout on the home (which is standard in Canada) so there wouldn’t be any kind of mortgage to continue paying, only property taxes. Remaining in the house would be achievable even with a minimum-wage job.
  Also, would this apply to non residential rental properties?
  My proposal targets only residential properties. Why would it have any effect on non-residential rentals? The entire purpose of that proposal is to deal with parasitism in the rental market, not anything else.
- The housing crisis arises out of one problem, and one problem only:
  Housing as an investment.
  My city has a rental vacancy rate of <4%, and a homeowner vacancy rate of <1%. Flippers leave a house empty while under the process of flipping it, and that's not what the numbers show. Landlords do increase the cost compared to ownership (they have to cover all normal costs of ownership, plus have profit for themselves), but they don't reduce the number of shelters being occupied. Not when vacancy rates are this low.
  In other words, my particular city may have costs driven up by flippers and landlords, but the number of dwelling units would be short even without them. Getting rid of them would be an insufficient solution, even if there are some benefits on costs. It does not address the problem that we need more dwelling units.
- Great ideas. Too bad our politicians don't listen to us.
- Housing units, July 1, 2022, (V2022) USA 143,786,655 Owner-occupied housing unit rate, 2018-2022 64.8% If only 2% is foreign owned that is 2,875,733. Which is a hell of a lot of units
- I'm okay with house flippers because they'll buy undervalued run down houses nobody wants and turn them into desirable homes.
  You can't love there during the work and it's a lot like recycling.
  I'm not a fan of the ones who strip the sole out of a perfectly good home and do what you mentioned.
  
  I’m okay with house flippers because they’ll buy undervalued run down houses nobody wants and turn them into desirable homes.
  House flippers are arguably responsible for a housing-quality crisis. Flippers often fewer lower code requirements than new builders. You end up with a lot of houses with nothing but cosmetic remediation and fairly substantial issues otherwise.

No person should be allowed to own more residential property than they're realistically need for living.
- I'm just curious how we'll define "realistic", because someone who's into just software programming might be satisfied with a studio apartment. I can't live without my basement workshop however. I like to make stuff.
  
  That's valid. But, for example: You don't need a dozen of different houses.
- This is it right here. Housing is a right, not a commodity. Landlords shouldn't exist.
- Do you allow couples to own two houses then? How do you prevent two people living together from not owning a second house to rent?
  Also, you'd be surprised just how little a person needs to live in lol.
  
  I don't think we need to make this literally true - we can put in a lot of wiggle room, because we just need to restrict doing this at scale
  Say, no more than 2 homes per household, 1 extra for each additional adult. You want a vacation house, or a place near work? Fine. You want to buy another house and take your time moving? Fine. You want both? Make some compromises.
  Or we could make the limit 5 per household - that would be excessive, but if they couldn't rent them out it would still decomodify housing, because it's people buying homes at scale that really is killing us
  From there, you'd crack down locally - if you want to live in the boonies, I don't care if you have 5 acres. If you live in a city with a housing shortage, maybe you only get a certain square footage per person, maybe certain areas are primary residence only, or however you want to slice it

That sounds like a solution but isn't. In my experience, the corporations I had as landlords were completely aware of what they are allowed to do and are obligated to do. The private landlords I had were the craziest removed imaginable. Stuff didn't happen as it should have, laws were intentionally misinterpreted and twisted, etc.
The reason why my experience differs so much is laws. Here in Germany, we've got strong renter's protection laws. They are still too weak in some places but really, really clear in most. So while my private landlord tried to make me pay for repairs, the company doesn't bother with such illegal bullshit, sends over a contractor they work with regularly and shit gets done.
- We have those problems here (the US) too but the greater problem is that corporations buying up homes is driving increases in housing prices. Greater housing prices leads to higher rent and higher mortgage payments, fucking over regular people every which way, unless of course you happened to buy your home 30 years ago, in which case everything's peachy and you can reverse mortgage yourself into a vacation home in Boca.
  
  Then with all that cash they drop some of it on buying the lawmakers, preventing or removing renter protections. Once that's done, remove things from the lease that cost $$, up the rent. Profit even more.
  
  There are some better ways to address this than what this post is advocating.
  For example, why should a corporation buying a residential property be getting the same (or better) interest rate than an individual who intends to buy it and live in it?
  Why should that corporation be able to deduct expenses that an individual could not if they were living there?
  There are ways to give the individuals a leg up over the corporations in the market without something drastic like this that has no chance of happening.
  
  We have a self inflicted real estate speculation problem. Housing can be a good investment or it can be affordable, but not both.
- The problem isn't corporate ownership of housing, it's generalized speculation in the real estate market.
  If you want to buy rental housing to maintain it for people to live in, that's a legitimate thing that benefits society.
  If you want to buy housing for the purposes of reselling it for more money, or converting permanent housing into rentals or illegal hotels, that doesn't have value.
  Housing should be for people to live in. Hotels should be for people to stay in.
- I also had good experiences with corporate landlords, if something broke they already had electrical/plumbing/other workers permanently hired that would come home the same week and fix everything without hassle. The price rises were established by national inflation indicators so there were not surprised rises on rent.

A co-op is another form of corporation. Dense, multi-family structures should be done that way.
What we don't want is for housing to be a speculative investment. Remove the profit motive of holding a house that's empty and reselling.
- Up until very recently most housing in Finland was co-ops, and it's still extremely common although many new developments are built and owned by corporations which then rent them out.
  I live and own shares in a new housing co-op (proportional to the size of my apartment), and all of us together own and run the building and we're renting the property from the city (although you can buy your share of that property off from the city if you don't want to pay that rent.) It's not a perfect system by any means but it's better than corporations owning everything; ideally the people who live in a building are the ones who decide how it's run, but of course that's sort of gone out the window too with rich people just buying properties speculatively and to rent them out. If enough of the shareholders in a building are rent-seekers, upkeep of the building is going to go way down because they don't live there themselves and don't give a shit about whether it's a nice place to live in, they care about making a profit.
- Damn. Someone that actually understands how things work and isn't just painting absolutes across the board.

Landownership is wrong all together.
If you think about it, it is completely absurd, why anyone assumes the right to 'own' a piece of land. Or even more land than the other guy. Someone must have been the person to first come up with the idea of ownership, but it is and was never based on anything other than an idea, and we should question it.
After all inheritance of landownership is a major cornerstone of our unjust and exploitative society.
- Every generation, people want to try new things and it's nice. But landownership can and has been and good thing in a way that just going back to "anarchy" wouldn't work. E.g. creation of ghettos, who gets to farm the best land, etc.
  So then the suggestions are that the land are owned and "managed" by the state apparatus. Now we have a few famines in history to show us how gaining favor in a political system is not the best way to manage the land.
  I'm open to better suggestions but just shitting on land ownership seems easy and unproductive.
  
  If someone owns a house, they kinda have to own at the very least some land around it. I just don't really see any other way for that to work. Would be interesting to hear how that could work otherwise.
  
  Now we have a few famines in history to show us how gaining favor in a political system is not the best way to manage the land.
  Doesn't that also mean The Irish famine shows private land ownership isn't the best way to manage land?
  
  Define for the class what you think anarchy means, and, wait one minute, you think ghettos are created by people not recognizing private land ownership?
  
  I'm pretty sure the Native Americans didn't believe in land ownership, at least not individual land ownership, more of a communal version, and it worked out well for them. They had huge societies, vast trade networks, and were able to feed themselves fine. It requires a different, non-capitalist, non-Western mindset, but it can work.
  
  Holy shit I didn't expect such a quality comment in this discussion.
  I would argue that corporations shouldn't be able to own residential land, and regular people shouldn't own more than two land pieces.
- That's all well and good but I don't want you living in my garden.
- People like the idea of the stability ownership offers. You can't be kicked out of your house or off your land you own because your income dropped out lost a job. How would you suggest this stability is maintained?
- It goes back to when good agricultural land discovered to be so ridiculously effective at feeding people.
  Not the beginning of wealth, but certainly one of the oldest still used store of wealth.
  So much has been fucked up by discovering agriculture, it was also the beginning of institutional slavery.
  
  You're not wrong but surely you don't mean to say that mankind should never have discovered agriculture, right? At that point we may as well say that gaining sentience fucked everything up because it was the beginning of wilfully hurting others despite having the capacity for empathy (aka doing evil things).
- Unfortunately land will fall into disrepair if someone doesn't actually own it. They have no incentive to invest in its upkeep if it can just be taken away at any moment. There's a reason rental buildings have a reputation for being unkempt, the renters don't want to pay for the upkeep since it's not theirs and the landlords don't want to pay for the upkeep because they don't live there.
  It gets even worse if government owns it, it would take 6 months just to get a light bulb changed let alone a new roof or hedges trimmed.
  
  Land that falls into "disrepair" has already been savaged, devastated and altered by greedy human hands in the first place.
  
  so i guess over 20% of houses in Austria, Netherlands, or Denmark have no lights and leaking roofs. if only those people got their own...
  
  That might be the case in your country, but there are many cultures that are perfectly capable of sharing and keeping common infrastructure in good conditions. Your personal experience isn't generic and globally true.
  A country's land should not be owned by individuals, in my opinion, but used by those who need it and when they do so. A country's land is what makes it a land, so it cannot be owned or sold. Someone inheriting it from someone who took it and maybe sold it should give no legitimate claim to possession.

We have one area of actual steady investment in our lives - our homes. And they can't handle us making a tiny bit of money
- I need an ironic WWII style scaremongering propaganda poster about class war. The 1% have class awareness. Do you?
  
  Scrath's comment made me check with Bing - i put your comment as the prompt, word by word:
  
  Edit: a week later i was wondering how far image generators get political context right. So i tried the same prompt on civitai ( without any additional resources ). Bing did a better job with the context, at least it repeated some of the input.
  
  That sounds like something one of those image AI's might be able to make for you.
- This is one of the most destructive things we’ve done as a society: making our homes into investment vehicles. It is the root cause of people no longer being able to afford housing.
- Homes don't generate value though. Nothing more is being created by them existing. How can it possibly be an investment generating more wealth when the underlying asset remains unchanged?
  It's just a pyramid scheme to expect the same exact home to continue going up in value as an investment. The only possible result is a shortage of housing with unreasonably high prices

Or contribute to political campaigns….or a thousand other things they abuse.

no real estate taxes for the first house owned, heavy and progressive taxes starting on the second, is an idea
companies get called people all the time, i'm starting to believe it, but i still think they don't need shelter, so they shouldn't be able to aquire a basic human need
- I have a feeling they'd just pass those taxes onto the renters.

investors should not be able to either.

Easy solution in my opinion:
only humans can own residential buildings
you must live in the building you own
- No more vacation homes/apartments?
  
  Good question. I didnt think of this. Maybe one needs to make an exception for hotels or something? Obviously this would need to be restricted so residential homes dont get transformed to hotels en masse.
- And you may own one cabin but it must be used by you and cannot be rented out
  
  Sounds great. When do we announce our international party to our voters?
- I have extended family that fall into "lower-upper class" but also know their income has an end date (comes from a lucrative career). They saved up and every time one of their kids turned 18, they bought a house to use as a rental property with a "just in case, my child will never end up homeless" gameplan. Not a huge cash expenditure for them and not a huge profit center, it bought them peace of mind a WHOLE lot cheaper overall than adding an apartment to their house for him to move back into as an adult.
  I always found that reasonable, and it did in fact keep them from ending up with a basically homeless 30-something.
  
  I understand the idea and its great if they were able to do that but the world would look a lot different if they would actually do it differently. There would be more houses to buy and they would be cheaper, their money would need to be put in other things to collect interest. The kids would be able to buy the houses themselves at 18 and the parents would have the same outcome, just bad actors would not be able to buy up the market.
  To be clear: your extended family is not the problem imo and would not suffer from a law like this.

B-but CoRpOrAtIoNs Is PeOpLe
- I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.
  Weirdly enough new York is on track to do that with Trump's company.
  
  Bad example, though. Even Trump himself barely qualifies as a person, much less his company.

One to four units should only be owned by people and the owner should have the obligation to live in it or there should be a radius around their property in which they can't own a second one.
Five to eight units should only be owned by well regulated corporations with the fiscal responsibilities this implies. The alternative would be co-ops.
Nine and more should be under a non profit state corporation that charges rent based on trying to break even only (that's how road insurance for people works around here, price is adjusted based on the previous year's cost to the corporation, it's way cheaper than private equivalents elsewhere in the country).
- Your plan cuts out normal people from the most likely reason they would own two homes, a place to live and a vacation property.
  I think the simpler and easier solution would be to increase property tax rate per property owned
  
  How? Do you own your vacation property in the same city you have your house?
  Even if it was just a 30 miles radius, it would be enough to dissuade most people who own two properties in order to profit from it.

Can I just say, this is a wonderful template. 🐕

At least 20 corporate shills have seen this post

You could have just stopped at "allowed."

Say it loud

You run into a problem that you need to mitigate for this to work: qualifying for a mortgage.
A landlord can rent to you for a year--or less--and they assume the risk of you not paying and needing to evict you. Their income verification can be a lot more loose as a result. A bank is going to be in a relationship with you for 15-30 years; they want to be pretty sure that you're going to be able to meet your financial obligations for that whole time period. As a result, they're going to be quite a bit more strict about proof of income, etc.
Renting can be cheaper, too; a tenant isn't on the hook for repairs to a unit, but when I need a new roof in my house, or the water heater goes out, I get to pay every penny of that myself. Yeah, the mortgage is cheaper, but just because you can afford the mortgage doesn't mean that you can afford everything else that goes into owning a home.
You also get into weird and perverse tax and zoning incentives that can make it difficult to build any kind of affordable housing; Dems say they want affordable housing, right up until someone wants to put it in their neighborhood, then they start acting like Republicans.
Yes, the lack of affordable housing is a huge problem. But it's not quite as black and white as it often seems.
- They don’t assume the risk? The moment I don’t pay by the third they are threatening to evict me. They charge rent that covers their monthly mortgage payment and then some. It’s the same shit. The place I rent now is owned by progress and it’s 50/50 it seems what they cover. On top of that I have to clean it all (professionally now , that’s new) when I move out. When I moved in the place was 1700 and now it’s 2400. There’s so much risk they’re taking in renting me a place , charging rent , but not getting anything back for it.
  
  They're threatening to evict you, yes. But actually evicting you, in at least some states, can be challenging. I know someone that rented out his entire home (long story), and got paid about three months of rent before they quit paying. It took him nearly two years to get them out. (Last I knew he was suing the agent that vetted them; apparently there was collusion, and the tenant has done this multiple times before.)
  The flip side is that if you quit paying your mortgage, it's also going to take months or years to get you out of the house, but then the bank has a piece of real estate. Banks don't want to own real estate; that's not their business. They're not set up to buy and sell real estate. Foreclosing on a house costs a bank a lot of money.
- Renting can be cheaper, too; a tenant isn't on the hook for repairs to a unit, but when I need a new roof in my house, or the water heater goes out, I get to pay every penny of that myself. Yeah, the mortgage is cheaper, but just because you can afford the mortgage doesn't mean that you can afford everything else that goes into owning a home.
  Don't worry about that, landlords have figured that out. There's a new 500 unit apartment complex that is currently being built in the Philadelphia suburbs that is taking applicants for units at the affordable price of $3500 per month.
  
  A roof that fails on a 500-unit apartment complex will be cheaper to replace per unit than the roof an a single family home. Same with a water heater that serves multiple families rather than a single family. Honestly, it's a good argument for communes, but communes have their own set of social problems, since it can be hard to get people to take responsibility for shit unless you go into it with the same kind of contract that you'd have when renting.
- One factor that might be interesting is if renting was banned, then property values would plummet – making mortgages more affordable. But I don't know if this would fully offset mortgage risk premiums and water heater (etc) insurance.
- Landlord apologists can freely choose between sucking my cock or eating shit.
- Dems say they want affordable housing, right up until someone wants to put it in their neighborhood, then they start acting like Republicans
  In my experience, this isn't the case unless someone (sometimes Republicans, sometimes just politicians) try to put ALL the affordable housing into specific neighborhoods for selfish reasons, or the place the affordable housing is going doesn't have jobs because someone actively avoid putting them in the places with jobs because "them poor people are criminals and will hurt business".
  New Bedford, MA was a great example. It was an open secret that MA acted to ship a high percentage of projects and Section 8 to New Bedford. It's also an open secret that budgeted commuter rail plans to New Bedford kept getting cut despite the rail running to the rural ass-crack of Western Mass, creating a job-starved desert of one of the otherwise most established economies in the state. Solely because somebody didn't want people in affordable housing to have mass-transit access to most of the state.
  I don't blame "The Dems" for that. Neither should anyone. This isn't NIMBY, this is "Let's put them all in your back yard. Then put more in your back yard. Then keep it coming. Then burn the bridge. Aren't I doing good?"
  
  It really is the Dems on this one. Esp. in MA, which has a Democratic supermajority. And California, and New York, and Illinois. All of those things you are saying are problems are problems created by Democrats, in Democratic-controlled states, because wealthy Democrats don't want to live near poor people.
  I'm not saying Republicans are better; Republicans absolutely have a "fuck them poors" attitude, and the Dems are at least claiming to want to treat people decently. But Dems aren't following through with what they say they want to do--affordable housing for all--while Republicans are definitely following through with their promise to fuck everyone that isn't already in the top 10%.
  BTW - section 8 should be great for a landlord. You are guaranteed payment on the 1st of every month, and you can still initiate eviction if the tenant is trashing your property or doing crime. But most landlords that aren't slumlords generally hate that shit, because they don't want poor people living there even if they're getting their money. It's stupid and short sighted.

Cries in New Zealand

Hmm, I think large corporations should never be allowed to purchase residences though anyone is allowed to create a corporation in the US you'll just need to declare a CEO, COO, and a treasurer. This could be a simple mom-and-pop family business with 3-4 people/employees, this could prevent a lot of normal people/small business owners struggling to create a profit from purchasing workspaces, their own home, work equipment.

As someone who lives in a corporate owned building which is an unmitigated disaster, I agree.
- If you don’t like it why don’t you move to a better building with better management?
  
  Leases have terms. Don't victim blame.
  
  You realize moving is a big deal, right? I could talk for 20 minutes about the challenges but the biggest one currently is that I'm extremely far from my lease's end date.

I wish every corporation buying residential properties a very haven hills alabama

Wait how can they? Wouldn’t them being able to buy it not make it “residential” anymore?
Cause a hotel is not a residential property.
- Unoccupied residential properties should be taxed at double the normal rate.
  And any resident who stays in the "hotel" is classified as a resident. No dodgy the taxes by calling it a hotel.

no brainer

is is basic leftism. if you think that statement is wrong, you're not a fucking leftist

No more landlords? That sounds like communism.

Hotels used to be where you lived if you were young and semi-transient. This worked because AirBNB had not yet been invented.

This just results in larger complexes being owned exclusively by the ultra rich. This idea outlaws the very concept of a co-op.

Huh, I thought this was about corporations tearing down apartments to build offices, but apparently that's not what everyone else was thinking.
- Because that's not the driving cause of minimum rent ballooning past the "30% of income" guideline for median earners in nearly every city in the US, while home prices are getting too high for someone spending more than 30% of their income on rent to save enough for the down payment necessary to be able to afford buying a home.
  THIS is the housing crisis. Not a lack of residential buildings for people to live in, but rather people being priced out of home ownership at every step of the game.
  The thing causing such price increases? Corporate ownership of residential buildings, because when they've bought out all the housing in an area they can set the price at whatever they want to make that money back. They have far more money and credit to buy up these homes than 999,999 out of a million individual owners, and they can use that to strong arm us out of the market. If you're not already in the game, you're barred from entering.
  
  Yeah.

Corporations shouldn't be allowed, period.
- Corporations don't have to be about making tons of money. They can be about organizing people to accomplish things that they couldn't individually. You then make money just to give those people a living wage and keeping the lights on.
  This doesn't even need to have a legal framework. Just a couple of people who agree to take up certain tasks is a company.
  
  Fine but they shouldn’t be considered as people, lobbying should be illegal, fines can’t just be part of the business plan, money is not free speech, and if a corp is caught doing illegal activities it should go to jail or be broken up like the rest of us.

While I agree, if that were a law, they would just get all residential property (except for their neighborhood) rezoned.
Edit: Man, you guys really missunderstood my comment. I wasn't saying we should roll over and die, I was just saying that wealthy shitheads cheat and steal.
- Rezoned to what and how?
- I guess corporations are just our rulers and and we shouldn't even try to restrict them because it might make them mad at us.
- Did you know that unlike a corporation, you actually have a say in what your government does?
  If they try to get an area rezoned, people can actually just say "no".
  This isn't some weird fantasy either, it actually happens all the time if you pay attention to your local government activity.

My friend owns three houses, the one he lives in and two he rents. He incorporated for tax purposes. Your saying he can't own the rental property because he's now taking advantage of the tax laws?
- You mean to say your friend incorporated for tax purposes because owning three houses would've been resulted in being taxed at a higher rate? That should be evidence enough.
  Unrelated but related: shell companies for the purposes of evading taxes should also not be an acceptable practice.
  
  That and as a real estate agent in Southern California it helps with his tax burden when selling houses near 1M. If the commission goes to his corporate account pays himself a taxed salary it's less than the taxes for the full amount. The rental is more of a long term investment than a profit from rent.
- Limit it to corporations of a certain size then. It's not people like your friend that are doing the bulk of the damage. It's large corporations buying up entire neighborhoods to rent them forever.
- That’s one persons opinion, but yes that’s what they are saying

Corporations build houses, why would they build houses they couldn't own?
- Because they're paid to do so? We hired a company to build our home, and after it was complete and paid for they held no further claim on it or on the property. Why would they?
  
  Because not every situation is exactly the same as yours
- They don't build land.

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