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2w ago

When leftists say "landlord are parasites" or similar dislike of landlords, do they also mean the people that own like a couple of houses as an investment, or only the big landlords?

Reason I'm asking is because I have an aunt that owns like maybe 3 - 5 (not sure the exact amount) small townhouses around the city (well, when I say "city" think of like the areas around a city where theres no tall buildings, but only small 2-3 stories single family homes in the neighborhood) and have these houses up for rent, and honestly, my aunt and her husband doesn't seem like a terrible people. They still work a normal job, and have to pay taxes like everyone else have to. They still have their own debts to pay. I'm not sure exactly how, but my parents say they did a combination of saving up money and taking loans from banks to be able to buy these properties, fix them, then put them up for rent. They don't overcharge, and usually charge slightly below the market to retain tenants, and fix things (or hire people to fix things) when their tenants request them.

I mean, they are just trying to survive in this capitalistic world. They wanna save up for retirement, and fund their kids to college, and leave something for their kids, so they have less of stress in life. I don't see them as bad people. I mean, its not like they own multiple apartment buildings, or doing excessive wealth hoarding.

Do leftists mean people like my aunt too? Or are they an exception to the "landlords are bad" sentinment?

512 comments

No raindrop thinks itself responsible for the flood.
- I’ve never heard this phrase before and I love it.
- Quit exhaling! We have a climate crisis!
  
  But this is my regulated breathing minute!

Don't take it personally, but landlordism is fundamentally parasitism. It's a matter of fact that private property, whether it's a townhouse or a factory, enables its owners to extract value from working people. If people personally resent landlords like your aunt, it's probably not so much because that's where the theory guides them as it is that almost everyone has had a bad experience with a landlord or knows someone who did. Landlords have earned a bad reputation.
- For most of my life I was not interested in owning a home. Owning meant I couldn't pick up and move or travel when I got the urge, which I did several times. One time while in a foreign country for a stay of undetermined length, I was able to contact an old landlord and secure a place to stay when I learned my return date. How would I have had a place to stay if landlords did not exist?
  
  "Land contract".
  A land contract starts out similar to a rental agreement. You make fixed monthly payments. If you stay in the home for 3 years, it automatically converts to a private mortgage, and the first three years of "rent" becomes your down payment. If you leave before a year, you forfeit your "security deposit", just like renting. If you leave before 3 years, you gain no equity; again, just like renting.
  If you ever do decide to settle down in one spot, you're already well on your way to ownership.
  I would solve the rental problem by creating a massive, punitively high tax rate on all residential properties, and issuing an equivalent tax exemption to owner-occupants. A land contract is recorded with the county, much like a deed or a lien, and the buyer/tenant would be considered the "owner" for tax purposes.
  
  That's nice that you found a place to stay after traveling the world, that you found some personal benefit from a system that leaves more than half a million people without proper housing (at least in the US). What does that have to do with anything that I wrote?
- I don't disagree that landlords are for the most part acting parasitically. However I would argue that in order for society to function "parasitism" is a requirement. I want to be clear and state that THIS form isn't required, but some form is.
  Let me explain my thinking. Nearly half of the population doesn't work. The population of non workers can almost entirely fall within these categories: children, attending school, disabled (mentally or physically), or retired.
  These populations need money even though they are not producing any. I would guess that most of the extracted profit that comes out of "mom and pop" rentals goes to providing for non-worker expenses.
  Now I believe these expenses should be covered by taxations and redistribution of the factor income, but since we have a pathetic system of this in the US it's hard for me to fault someone for using investment property to hedge against child care and/or retirement
  
  I am not as well read as I would like, but I don't think Marxist theory really faults anyone for acting in their apparent self-interest. The point is to become aware that you belong to a class with common interests, likely the working class, and that you can team up with your fellow workers and tenants to build leverage and get a better deal. Eventually, you can stop surrendering the wealth you and your class create to the minority bourgeoisie class.
  To your point, a landlord who also has to hold down a regular job is still part of the working class. However, they might fall into the subcategories of labor aristocracy or petit bourgeoisie. Because they have it a little better, they're less reliable or even traitorous in the class struggle compared to regular workers, even though they rarely have the juice to make it into the bourgeoisie.
  
  What you're talking about, I wouldn't call parasitism.
  The owner of a home has "freedom". When you buy a home, you are free to do with it what you want. What makes landlords parasites is that the tenant is paying for that landlord's "freedom", but they are not receiving it themselves.
- You can only say that landlords extract value from working people if they take money without giving anything in return. But landlords provide housing, which is certainly of great value.
  Emotional reasoning tells us this is parasitism in the following ways:
  we believe housing is a human right therefore no one can claim they provide it as a value - it’s something we are all entitled to.
  once a house exists it seems like the landlord doesn’t “do” anything in order to provide the housing, except sit there and own it. So this must be theft because they are getting something for nothing.
  #1 I understand and if you feel this then work to have it enacted as law in your homeland, because until it is enshrined in the system, you can’t expect anyone to just give away housing.
  #2 is somewhat naive, because owning a house has costs including (minimally) taxes, insurance, and maintenance. Owning housing always carries a large risk too - you could incur major damage from a flood, hurricane, earthquake. And those are incredibly expensive to recover from. Not for renters, though - they just move.
  The most important question of all is: how does housing come into being? If we make housing something that cannot be offered as a value, who will build? The up front cost to build housing is enormous and it may take decades of “sitting there doing nothing” to collect enough rent to recoup that.
  People make all the same arguments about lending money. It’s predatory and extracts value from the people. But without the ability to borrow money, no one could build or buy a home, or start a business.
  Much could be done to improve how lending and landlording work, to make them more fair and less exploitative, but when people say that in their very essence they are evil I think they are just naive children seeing mustache twirling villains everywhere.
  
  It's not emotional reasoning. The rental income that a landlord collects is not a wage based on any labor that they do. It is a dividend on a real estate investment. The crucial mechanism to a rental property investment is the license to withhold or take away housing from people. That's what makes landlordism extractive and parasitic. Landlords simply do not provide housing. They capture it and extort people for temporary permission to live in it.
  If you want some emotional reasoning as to why people resent landlords, here's a short list I wrote from a similar thread:
  Almost everyone has had or knows someone who's had to deal with an especially neglectful or difficult landlord;
  landlords have been engaging in notoriously greedy and abusive behavior since the industrial revolution;
  landlords aren't doing themselves any favors they way some of them publicly brag and whine about being landlords;
  and there's just something that isn't right about owning someone else's home and probably everyone has some faint sense of that.
  
  how does housing come into being?
  Well one "simple" way is for all the builders to be rolled up into the civil service: the government pays them to do their job, i.e. build houses, which the government then owns and allows people to live in. This must necessarily be rent-free, otherwise the government becomes one massive landlord therefore not solving the problem, and also takes the bottom out of the mortgage market because why would anyone buy when they can just move into government-provided housing without a 25-year millstone tied round their necks. It also creates a ton of job security because it means you can just walk away from a shitty employer without fear of becoming homeless.
  It also drops anyone with a mortgage into the worst possible negative equity problem, which will be a massive problem for a massive number of people, therefore has zero chance of ever being voted in. So for this to work there has to be a solution to the mortgage problem, e.g. the government buys all that housing stock for the current outstanding mortgage amount, but that's a massive investment into something that now necessarily has zero value, which would likely crash the economy. IANAE so it'd be interesting to get a real economist's view on how this might all work in practice.

“Landlords provide housing like scalpers provide concert tickets.”
https://lifehacker.com/why-everyone-hates-landlords-now-1849100799
That said, I do think there need to be ways to rent housing rather than buy it, since many people need that flexibility. Looks like the answer to that might be community land trusts?
- Or public housing
- What a magnificent comparison!

The answer you receive will vary based on which political ideology you ask.
I will answer from the perspective of an anarchist.
Your Aunt and her Husband are not committing the greatest of evils, but in the grand scheme of things, they're a part of a bigger problem, one that they themselves would not even perceive, and in fact would have strong personal incentives not to grant legitimacy were it explained to them.
Anarchists, or libertarian socialists, are generally against the concept of private property in all forms. This is not to be confused with personal property, which are things you personally own and use, such as the house you live in, your car, your tools.
Private property is something you own to extract profit from simply by the act of owning it, and necessarily at the deprivation and exploitation of someone else.
By owning those townhomes that they themselves do not live in, they are able to exploit the absolute basic human requirement for shelter in an artificially restricted market, and thus acquire surplus value in a deal of unequal leverage.
You could argue they are justified due to offering below market rates, taking on the financial risk of owning and maintaining the property, and fronting the capital to own the investment.
But the issue is: their choice to become landlords is what in fact creates the conditions for which they can then offer solutions in order to claim moral justification.
For if we consider if landlordism were completely abolished, and people were only allowed to own homes they personally use, it would result in an insane amount of housing stock to flood the market, causing housing prices to plummet. This would in turn allow millions of lower income people to be able to afford a home and pay it off quickly, allowing them to actually build wealth for the first time instead of most of it going to pay off rent (remember, your aunt charging below market is the exception, not the norm).
Most humans would much rather pay off a small mortgage on a non-inflated home themselves, instead of paying off someone else's artifically inflated mortgage and then some.
But that's all assuming we have a housing market still. In an ideal Anarchist society, housing would be a human right, and every human would have access to basic shelter and necessities of life, like was enacted for a short time in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War.
- So anarchists want Basic from the Expanse pretty much?
  Basic in the world of the Expanse provided people with a very basic apartment with a bed, table and a TV along with three nutritionally complete (not delicious) meals per day for free.
  If you wanted anything more, you had to work or enlist.
  
  Yeah, that sounds about right. I only read the first few chapters of the expanse, but I believe the world is still capitalist overall, yes? if so, that would make it more in line with perhaps the end goal of a social democrat, where there's a super strong welfare and social safety net, but still capital and big businesses.
  The assumption from Anarchists is achieving that Social Democrat ideal is impossible under capitalism, as it would remove almost all of the leverage corporations have to exploit their workers, leaving little profit left for them, and thus inciting them to revolt, like they almost did during The Business Plot in response to FDR's new deal finally giving the working class some room to breathe.
- (remember, your aunt charging below market is the exception, not the norm)
  Isn't this definitionally true? The norm, by definition, is the market rate.
  
  Yes, and charging below that would be a deviation from the norm.

Yes. You shouldn't be allowed to have a second house to rent out. The problem is limited supply in a given area, and if everyone buys a second, third, fourth house (or townhouse) then there is no supply left for people that want to actually buy to live in that house. Frankly I think it's unethical. There are plenty of other ways to invest your money.
I also don't think this position is limited to leftists, although yes the leftists here have a very dramatic take. I think anyone that thinks about this should see the problem.
- Who is allowed to rent to the people who don’t want to buy?
  Should the city own property just for that and run it as a non-profit?
  
  The community should have ownership of whatever rentals are necessary and it should be not for profit.
  
  Yes. The ability to have a place to live should be a basic human right and therefore be affordable.
  If that means the government* subsidises it for the low income families (as in owns them and rents them at below market value), so be it.
  We used to have “council houses” in the UK for exactly this purpose, but in the 70s, Thatcher came up with a “right to buy” (at a decent discount) and then made two mistakes - there were no restrictions after buying to stop you selling to anyone else, and there was no building of replacement stock after they were sold. So the result 50 years later is that there are nowhere near enough council houses any more, and a lot of the old ones are privately owned and being rented out at market rates, which are (depending on the area) very expensive.
  *local or national, I don’t really care which
  
  Yes, that's ideal. In Germany (where there is a culture much more oriented towards renting than owning) there are a lot of state run landlords and they are great to rent from, reasonable rents, reasonable to deal with (in the local context), etc. And of course they have good laws to protect tenants to back it up. Not necessarily a perfect system but definitely one the rest of the world can learn from. Unfortunately things are still heading in the wrong direction there too right now.
  
  Yes.
  
  For houses? Essentially no one, houses should not be for rent. Apartments in my mind are fine to rent because you can build a fuckton of apartments on a small amount of land. But there can still be a problem if there aren't enough apartments available to buy.

Every house that is owned for an investment contributes to the high price of housing. People shouldn’t own homes if they’re not going to make them a home. It’s unethical in my view to hoard real estate.
- This is a genuine question: what's the difference do you think between investments in general and real estate investments? I mean, technically investing of any kind is hoarding. It may not have such direct impact on basic needs, but it surely does overall.
  
  When landlords "invest" in the housing market, they are not making the system of providing housing for people better or more efficient. They are buying up a limited supply of properties that exist in desirable areas and then charging people for the right to use them plus a nice profit for themselves. This reduces the supply for a necessary good and drives up prices, making it profitable for landlords, and a massive, efficiency draining, example of rent-seeking for the system as a whole since the landlord's basically don't work and instead take a cut of what everyone else makes doing useful work.
  If you invest in some predatory companies you might be investing in companies that do that, or might do some other predatory practice, but you can also just be putting money into a business so that it has more money to grow its operations, or invest in some new efficiency that makes them run better, and that then both returns a profit back to both of you and helps improve the system as a whole.
  Think about it this way, when you retire, you are going to need money to sustain you for a long time after you stop being able to work, so while you're working, you need to save that money up. That money can just sit in your bank account doing nothing for anyone, or you can invest it in a business that lets them use those resources now and lets you get your retirement money back 30 years from now when you need it (though in reality that's spread across hundreds of companies to reduce risk). That's how investment can be a net benefit to society and make for a better use of resources, characteristics not present with landlords and housing investments.
  
  No, not all investment is the same. look up the difference between rent and profit.
  
  I don't think a bunch of people pitching in to fund a company is in and of itself a bad thing, but there are several considerations that are extensions of that that stray into unethical territory. foremost is the matter of fiduciary responsibility. When a company is publicly traded they have a legal responsibility to put money in the investor's pockets, and that shapes the behavior of that company in ways that can be very harmful. Intent shapes action, and the imperative to provide profits to investors changes whatever intention that company may have had when it was founded. It means if the company has a choice between fulfilling that imperative or doing something to reduce harm to the world around them they will always make the decision that fulfills the intention. Where if your intention is just to be the best at something, or to provide a service, you would make a different set of decisions. The biggest example that's particularly central in public consciousness right now is the health industry. Health insurance companies have the ability to ensure that their customers are well taken care of and that healthcare is accessible, but providing healthcare isn't the point. Providing profit to their shareholders is the point, so in every situation where the profit, and the doing the right thing, conflict they will always choose the former because that's the whole reason they're doing it in the first place. Even if the CEO wanted to lead the company in a more ethical direction they couldn't do so without courting legal action, if the investors believe their decisions aren't maximizing profits. Multiply this by time and companies gradually become worse, even if they started out great. Enshitification isn't just for the internet. Often this leads to unethical ends, as in the health insurance example where it causes thousands of deaths each year. A lot of it depends on whether the demand for something is fixed or elastic. Say you wanted to purchase a lot of something as an investment, if that thing is FunCo Pop figurines and you're hoarding them banking that they'll increase in value due to scarcity could be sold later at a markup. People can take or leave FunCo Pops, They can choose not to spend their money on your marked up collectibles. Hoarding them would be a dick move, but not necessarily unethical. If the thing you're buying up is water the landscape changes. People need water, every single person needs water. That demand is not elastic, people have to have it or they literally die. If you hoarded that resource so that you could sell it at a higher price, and that prices some people out of being able to access water, it's more than unethical. It's straight up wicked. Your intention isn't to provide water. It's to maximise your profits, and thus your decisions will always be guided by those priorities. It's nuanced. But not very difficult to understand. The world could change for the better, but the profit margins are too slim to make it a worthwhile goal for a savvy capitalist.

It's shades of gray. A company that rents out millions of houses is millions times worse than your aunt. Your aunt is still contributing to unaffordable housing and keeping 2-3 families from permanent housing. How bad she is is up for debate and I for one don't care to debate that. Being upset about people like your aunt is pointless when we should be insanely angry about corporate mass homeownership.

Owning property isn’t a job
- No, but it requires work and time and money for maintenance, insurance, and taxes.
  
  It's almost like... it's... a... job. How strange.

It's all.
Buying a house as an "investment" is what we call "scalping" in other businesses. Not to mention the fact that this type of buying worsens housing prices and increases homelessness for personal gain, even on a small scale.
The only exception I can give is people who rent out part of their own home, as this situation actually creates available housing.
- Exactly. Housing is finite and other people live here too.
- Buying a house as an “investment” is what we call “scalping” in other businesses.
  Actually, it's called capitalism. Buying anything and selling it at a profit increases prices. Strange... but true.
  
  An increasing number of Americans are beginning to see the problems inherent in capitalism.

Unless your aunt is transferring equity in those homes to the tenants based on the amount they pay in rent, then yes, she's a leech. "Providing shelter" isn't the service your aunt is providing; she's just preventing someone else from owning a home.
And before anyone says "but renting is all some people can afford, they can't save up enough to make a down payment" - yes, sure, that's true. But that's a symptom of the shitty housing market (really the shitty state of the middle class in general*), and landlords aren't making it any better by hoarding property, even if it's "just" 3 to 5 townhomes.
- People who don't want to buy a home at that location would still need a place to live. Someone needs to rent it to them. Until someone comes along to create government housing or whatever, this is the best we can offer as an individual.
  On the topic of transferring equity, how much is reasonable equity? Why not rent at cost instead of charging more and giving it back in a different form?
  
  People who don’t want to buy a home at that location would still need a place to live. Someone needs to rent it to them.
  I don't understand what you mean by this. No one needs to rent anything to anyone, if resources are distributed fairly.
  On the topic of transferring equity, how much is reasonable equity? Why not rent at cost instead of charging more and giving it back in a different form?
  If a renter pays the same amount of money as the landlord pays towards their mortgage, and the renter has paid rent for as long as the landlord has paid the mortgage, the renter should have as much equity in the property as the landlord does.
- You are incorrect. The service is providing someone a home if they don't want to own their own or if they don't have the financial means to do so
  No landlords hoard property. The property is used by people.
  
  No landlords hoard property.
  Fine, landlords hoard property ownership.
  The property is used by people.
  As long as the landlord permits it, and as long as the landlord gets their premium.
  Landlords profit off of permitting people access to shelter, a basic right that any human should be entitled to. It's literally modern day feudalism.
- It's not nice to call people leeches, esp. if you really don't know anything about them.
- What is a person who made good (or lucky) decisions and made enough money to be comfortable in the present but not so much to retire supposed to do with their money?
  Give it to you instead?
  Sure, billionaires and X00 millionaires don't need to exist, but so far as I can tell "leftists" are a .ml / tankie crab bucket. Fuck me for having more money than you but not enough to take the homeless off the street as is my obligation. Please tell me how to keep leftist virtue so I can have ~30 upvotes to retire on.
  
  I don't understand. You think the only two things one can do with excess money is buy real estate, or give that excess to me? I'm flattered to be sure, but there's a whole lot of other options out there

it is not possible to have a property as an investment, without screwing someone else over. So yeah, her too.
- The landlord charges enough in monthly rent to cover mortgage, house maintenance, and provide profit. So the argument about it being a service to tenants is BS as the tenant could afford this on their own.
  Landlords rely on the credit system for denial and cost of entry into property ownership to exploit tenants.

Landlordism is parasitic. The point of Leftism isn't to attack individuals, but structures, and replace them with better ones. Trying to morally justify singular landlords ignores the key of the Leftist critique and simplifies it to sloganeering.
- Thank you! Nicely put. The problem isn't people like your aunt, its massive shareholder-controlled investemet machines that own thousands or even millions of homes. Your aunt probably knows eafh renter by name - there can exist a personal relationship. There's two things limiting your aunt becoming a money-hungry antisocial ghoul:
  raising the rent is a relatively large amount of work for relatively small of a reward. If she raises rent she has to write these 4-5 renters a letter explaining why she has to increase it. Those renters might disagree, have objections, ask for reasons and proofs (like the central heating bill or maintanance costs etc). If she raises the rent by lets say 2% it's 2% of not that much money (with her single digit number if houses).
  she is raising the rent on people she knows. She is taking money away from people she even may like - have a personal relationship with.
  So increasing rent is a lot of hassle and her renters might like her less after that - which might be a factor.
  Now lets think of the hugr real estate company. They have thousands of renters and maybe hundreds of employees. They have lawyers employed. If they raise rent by 2% they have to send thousands of letters. But these letters are sent by people whose job it is to do so. Tyey can calculate in advance that from their renters X% will just accept the nrew rent, Y% will require some manouvering, Z% might move out and so on. They can estimate the cost of raising rent pretty well based on experience and compare to the profits they make. And with thousands of apartmants 2% is a lot of profit. The employees have no relationship to the thousands of renters. Renters are just numbers anyway. Everything is much more efficient. Also: Shareholders. They demand profits and dont't care how. They care even less aboht the renters. They demand more profit and will just say "make it happen". If thr ceo doesn't raise profits - with whatever means necessary - the shareholders will replace the ceo.
  The soltion IMHO would be some progressive tax That makes it basically unprofitable to have more than 10 apartments. And to prevent legal entities owning other legal entities owning apartments in order to circumvent this. If there exists (and can reasonable exist) a personal relationship between landlord and renter everything is alright in my opinion. People usually are not animals to eaxh other if they know eaxh other personal.
  
  And to prevent legal entities owning other legal entities owning apartments
  This is one huge issue I have with our current end stage capitalistic system. If corporations are "people" then how can they own other corporations, which are also "people" right?
  If shareholders want to own shares in multiple companies, they can still do that.

I would argue that nobody should own a home they don't actually live in. All renting out does is increase the housing cost overall because nobody would ever operate at a loss or to break even. This is the issue people have with say, Blackrock who buys hundreds of homes at a time and rents them out.
Your family aren't bad people but the business they decided to take up is inherently bad by design. If the law changed tomorrow saying all multi homes must sell to non homeowners, everyone would watch prices drop and be able to afford it.
Using homes as an investment is at its basics, exploiting a need by interpreting it as a want or practical goods. Homes are for living in. The housing industry views homes like commodities as if people have a wide choice and selection when it's really "Omg we can afford this one that popped up randomly, we have 12 hours to decide if we want to pay 50k more to beat others away" and then lose anyway after bidding to Blackrock who pays 100k over asking.
- Homeowners also treat their home as an investment. Which also makes housing more expensive and inaccessible. Moving away from renting is not the solution, we need a more comprehensive change in the system.
  
  The context here is quite different; in other words, you got an apples vs oranges issue here. A single home owner does not expect to profit from that investment; the increase in value is more of an insurance than anything (mortgages are taken out to cover emergencies, or the increase in value provides the means to move to a new home, etc). So, again, the context is extremely different.
  Besides, if the expected inflation in value were the issue, shouldn't I expect increased wages to make up the difference? I.e. no, that would not contribute to making the housing market too expensive for the average person to find accessible.

Ideologies tend to sort people into a limited number of overly simplistic categories. This makes theorising easier but applying it to reality much harder.
Very few people could live in a capitalist system and remain pure. e.g. My pension fund is invested in the stock market so I very partially own thousands of companies. I've also purchased a small amount of shares in selected companies, a situation I had more agency in creating. Sometimes I subcontract work to other contractors who function as my temporary employees. And so on.
- Is there an ethical way to try and ensure that I will have food, shelter and medical care as I age? In the US we can’t depend on the government safety net. Everyone isn’t as able in their 60’s and 70’s as they were in their 30’s and 40’s, so assuming that I’ll be able to work and make a reasonable income the rest of my life is wildly optimistic. Anyone working at a job for 30+ years shouldn’t be stressed about survival but that’s not reality. Putting money in a savings account at a credit union is good but I don’t think that will move the needle. Any decent pension or retirement plan is gonna put money in the stock market. Even with passive investing in index funds, you’re on of the stock holders that fucks like that UHC CEO was trying to appease. Given the state of the economy in the US today, buying and renting a duplex, triplex or small apartment building might be less evil than owning random stocks.

Houses aren't investments, so yes.
- Tell that to my mortgage.
  For the record I own exactly one house, it's in terrible condition and I don't have the funds to renovate. Because of the mortgage.
  
  In this case, your debt is the investment

We arent a homogenous group, but ill tell you my personal opinion.
I trust you when you say your aunt is not bad, but what she is doing is bad (and i am sure she is unaware of it). Those 3 to 5 houses she bought are 3 to 5 houses that families cant buy. A few bad side effects:
It lowers the housing stock in the area, so artifucial scarcity brings the prices up artificially.
It seperates families from their communities. When your children grow up and have famailies ofbtheir own, they cant afford to stay in the community and are forced to leave
The families that do stay and are forced to rent arent building any equity for their children. In effect, it stunts upward mobility.
There are people who do want to rent, and people whoneed to rent, but that should happen in priperly dense apartment building designed specifically for that. When houses meant for families are snatched up to profit off of, it is parasitic.
I get it, they are just trying to survive. They are playing the game that exists. Thats why i personally dont belive that most landlords like you are describing are bad people. I think the ultinate issue is that out elected officials do nothing about it. It should be illegal, or have tax implications that discourage the practice.
- There are people who do want to rent, and people whoneed to rent, but that should happen in priperly dense apartment building designed specifically for that.
  Who are you to say what people should or shouldn’t rent. Should all renters be piled on top of each other in over packed buildings with 600 square feet to themselves? Why can’t I rent a 2000 square foot town home for my family so that they are safe while I save up to buy my own home?
  And say I rent a townhome for 10 years, then buy my own townhome, then 10 years later I rent it out to someone else while I buy something bigger? What’s wrong with that.
  I think what we all have a problem with is housing affordability and a lack of systematic focus by the government on eliminating poverty.
  The issue isn’t some small time landlord with 5 condos, it’s the investment groups with 5000 condos which artificially juice the rents year after year.
  It’s insulting to say that all of the poor people who cannot afford to buy a home should have to live in densely packed buildings.
  
  Rent for single family properties is higher than the mortgage of that same property. In theory. So ideally no single family property should be rented as its purely a parasite relationship. Again, in theory.
  The problem is that isn't always true in practice with today's market and rules. because if the previous owner has had their mortgage long enough, then it could be quite a lot less than a new mortgage. That makes a situation where rent is higher than their old mortgage (providing landlord profit), but cheaper than a new mortgage (providing a valid choice to a renter).
  But many of us argue that the current situation is unnecessary and drives up overall market costs. Even when done by just small landlords, it all adds up because the system allows it to.
  So its not so much telling you what to rent and what not to rent. its more that in a better system, you wouldnt ever choose to rent that way. Mortgages on small or attached single family homes would just be cheaper and affordable like they were in the past. And if you needed even less costs, renting would be the option in actual properties designed for it. Whether that is sardine packed 600 sqft, or not.
  
  I dont think the apartments should be small, ive lived in apartments for most of my life. Msxing out square footage is also a shitty developer tactic, but thats another story

I lost my original comment I was typing as my device died so I’ll keep it short. Your aunt extracts money from people on the basis of owning private property (private property is property that is owned by an individual for non-personal use). She doesn’t earn the money through her own labour, she gets it by owning an asset that she herself has no use for and someone else needs and charges that person for using it. This is a parasitic relationship. Now to answer your question about if she is a bad person because of it, I would say not necessarily. The fact that landlords exist is a bad thing. We live in a system however where investment in private property (something inherently parasitic) is often the only way to retire. Every working Australian is required by law to invest a portion of their pay into an investment fund. This too is parasitic. That doesn’t however make every working Australian a bad person, they are just working within the system and doing what is required of them to live. Another thing to keep in mind is that for every house that is owned as an investment property, the price to buy a house goes up. By being a landlord, you make it harder for others to own a home.

Landlords being parasites isn't even a leftist sentiment, it's common sense. Here's Adam Smith:
“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.”
They are the only one of the three orders whose revenue costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them, as it were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project of their own. That indolence, which is the natural effect of the ease and security of their situation, renders them too often, not only ignorant, but incapable of that application of mind"

Yes all landlords.
- This is incorrect.
  
  All landlords, regardless of how many properties they rent out, are ultimately producing nothing. They sit on property and leech money off of the economy. The scale at which it is done does not change the core "product" (which isn't a product at all, in the traditional sense, because it is not produced). It's a classic grift.
  So, yes: all landlords.
  Edit: in some sense, all forms of "passive income" follow the same pattern. Capitalism relies on money being exchanged for goods and services. Passive income is a perverse adulteration of that. Free money is not a thing.

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.
- You assume that everybody wants to own and that just isn't the case.
  
  I assume that everyone who wants to own a home wants to own a home and many of those aren't able to. That's the current reality.
  Edit: I reread what I said and I distinctly said that it should be "a right". Having a right to do something is not the same as having an obligation to do something. Imo home ownership should be a right for everyone, but that doesn't make it an obligation.
  
  I'm 40 and have friends my age who rent because they don't want to own even though they can afford to. I'm not sure what percentage of renters are like them.
  
  We can worry about that when there's a lack of places to rent and homelessness is down.
  
  People will always have a chance to rent since apartments exist, but people do not have a chance to buy houses

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
- What about families that need a place but don't want to buy? Like if I'm getting a job in a new area and needed to move but know I'll be leaving in 1-5 years. I wouldn't want to deal with the paperwork. I wouldn't be mad to rent a house.
  
  Ideally houses that aren't used by anyone would be cared for collectively, and would be free for anyone to use for as much time as they need it.
  That assumes that housing is a human right, and that adequate housing exists with a small surplus in most societies (and considering there are more empty homes than there are homeless in the US right now, that would be a feasible thing to achieve were capitalism not creating intense conflicts of interests).
- What's the difference between profiting from stocks or profiting from rent? Either way, I'm increasing my spending power
  
  People need a place to live, they don't need stocks to live. By owning more properties than you need you are contributing to a scarcity and inflated pricing for a basic necessity.
  
  Your stocks do not deprive anyone else of an essential human need, while owning and renting out a house you do not personally use artificially deprives another of buying that house, which further raises housing prices, making an essential human need, an investment vehicle.
  Using a different analogy, if you lived in an area with scarce water resources, but happened to purchase land with a particularly abundant spring, you could then profit handsomely by selling that water to the thirsty at an extremely high rate, exploiting the human need for water, and depriving those who cannot afford it in exchange for your own enrichment.
  
  If you buy stocks, you’re essentially just hoping to find someone who is willing to pay more for the same thing. If you own property and rent it out, you’re providing a service to someone who needs it. In the latter case, you’re creating value.
- Putting money in the stock market isn’t making it do something productive. It’s not like your average person is able to participate in IPOs and fund some new venture. If I buy shares of company, the company already got the money years ago; I’m just speculating that someone else will want to buy my shares for more in the future. And then if I buy stock in Shell Oil or United Healthcare, that’s pretty evil. But I also don’t have the time and skills to actively manage a portfolio to meet some bare minimum ethical standards.
  
  I'm just speculating that someone else will want to buy
  No, not entirely. Lots of companies pay dividends. Buy stock in those, and you're speculating that they'll continue to be profitable enough to pay dividends.
  don't have the time and skills
  I'm not sure I can agree on this point, either. The time, maybe. The skill? If you're skilled enough to use Lemmy, you're skilled enough to set up a brokerage account and click "buy" on whichever companies meet your criteria. It's not actually any more complicated than online banking IMO.

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.
- A bit of a hyperbole, but for the sake of this discussion, let's say there is a house and no one can afford it but me. If I don't buy it and rent it, no one can live in it. What would be the right thing to do?
  
  The market determines the price. If no one can afford it the price is too high.
  
  Reduce the price of the house
  
  I take umbrage with the hypothetical itself. Do you believe that buying the property and renting it out is the only possible solution here?
  The "right thing" would be to not have a situation like that in the first place where only one person (or one small group of people) can afford to own the roof over their head.
  But, obviously, an option you're neglecting here, is letting people live in the property without paying rent. Nobody is forcing you to make a profit off people's basic needs for survival.
  
  If you didnt buy it in this scenario, then market pressure eventually pushes the proce down until someone is willing (and able) to buy it.

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.
- On the other hand, rented homes has lots of demand, and that is only possible if someone else owns it.
  Landslords provides a service that people need. Although not all landlords does it well.
  
  Many people (not all) rent because they can't afford to buy, not because they don't want to own property.
  
  Alternatively, the government can own it and provide it at very low to no cost because they care about their people having somewhere to live.

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.
- My understanding of parasitism is extracting resources for their own benefit, with little to no benefit for the exploited/system.
  This defines almost every transactional function in our society.
- If landlords are so evil, would their tenants alternatively buy the apartment where they rent? People rent for many reasons - perhaps they can't afford to buy , or perhaps they like paying a fixed amount so someone else can fix the house when things break.
  Either way it isn't the landlords fault that many cities have restrictive zoning laws and we are still reeling from missed housing development during the great recession. Demand for housing has well outdated supply and inflation has made the inputs more expensive, thus prices have gone up. More supply will help reduce the rate of increase, but real prices will not decline without another deep recession, and the impact of that would still be temporary.
  If landlords are middleman, would you prefer everyone lives in government housing? Explain the alternative in your fantasy land related to housing, not some ridiculous anecdote about charging for air.
  
  My point is, if you read "aunt" as "landlord", my comment is not about the landlords as much as the system.
  Without landlords, we'd not have a housing crisis. There would be enough housing for everyone, we have plenty of resources and land to build them. The US, not to mention the world, is still big enough for everyone to have their own plot of land and housing.
  How did people live before Capitalism? I've read that housing existed before even banking was invented. Somehow there wasn't a housing crisis back then, until/unless we had exploitation.
  You're not wrong in what you're saying though. The basic difference of perspective between you and I, I believe, is that you're viewing this from inside the capitalist system, where landlords do indeed provide a function. But if we'd not have capitalism, we'd still have housing, and with less value extraction/parasitism.
  As for the obscure anecdote, let's instead use the simile of marketing. They add no value to you as a consumer, and if there weren't so many marketers finding what you need would be easier and cheaper (as there would be no marketing cost). For the capitalist they add value, for the rest of us they're an ever increasing drain on resources - a parasite.
  
  That was over a decade ago. We absolutely could have covered the gap by now if we were serious about it.
  And yes government housing is fine.
  
  Dont forget how the secondary real estate market drove prices up and as been doing so since the 70s

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.
- Lol

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)
- What constitutes an "investment"?
  If you buy a home and have a roommate so you can afford the mortgage is that an investment?
  If you buy a home and then sell it down the road for a profit, is that an investment?
  
  I and I think many in the left would say no to both of those, especially if you lived there yourself in the second case. The abhorrent behavior is buying multiple houses and charging rent that is high enough to not just cover mortgage and maintenance but also turn a large profit, enough to where you can live entirely off of it at the expense of your tenants. And do things like raise the rent every year because "the market allows for it" even though your mortgage cost hasn't changed.
  There is obviously a grey area in between that everyone will have different opinions on. But in my view it is POSSIBLE to rent a property ethically, using lower than industry rents and being generally nice about it rather than viewing it as an opportunity for exploitation
- If nobody is renting out family homes, there will be no family homes to rent. Many people prefer to rent their home.
- No landlords are "parasites". Rental property owners provide a valuable service.
  
  Thanks for your honesty about which side you've chosen, saves a lot of trouble
  
  The only thing worse than parasites are the lifeforms that feed on their droppings. At least the parasites have enough self respect to merely suck blood.

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.

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.
- what your aunt is doing is what essentially capitalism is all about.
  Both things can be true. Capitalism is inherently parasitic.
  
  Capitalism is inherently parasitic
  I fundamentally disagree with that.
  Venture Capitalism is parasitic. But Capitalism itself is not at all. At it's heart, if we continue with the landlord analogy, let's say that you are renting a house from the OP's Aunt. She's paying the building insurance. She's paying the maintenance, (or in some good old fashioned cases doing it themselves). She's dealing with the paperwork involved in owning a home. Hell, in some cases you don't even have to mow your own lawn. So of course she's charging you rent. It's not a charity.
  But if she's a private owner, than your rent stays with her. She uses what she needs to maintain the building and...yes...makes a profit that then gets spent in the local economy.
  The only time there's an issue is when your rent is being sent to a corporation that may not even be in the same country as you, and that money leaves your local economy for good.
  To use an anecdotal example, I've worked in my time for two different furniture stores in my town. One was a chain, and one was/is a family run operation from the beginning. And yes...that family is wildly successful; I'm not guessing millionaires, but close to it. And I don't begrudge them at all for that. Because it's family owned, they aren't forced to only care about a stock price or about profit. My boss would randomly come up to me, sometimes multiple times a year, clap me on the back and say "You're doing a good job, I'm going to add a buck an hour to your wage."
  Because they can. Because for all intents and purposes, you've got a better chance to be treated like a human being when a corporation isn't in the way.
  The chain furniture store would only give out raises when forced to by government mandated cost of living increases, because anything more would cause the stock price to go down.
  The heart of capitalism is my first example. The reality of capitalism is my second unfortunately. But that's not the fault of capitalism itself, it's the lack of government oversight protecting us from predatory corporations.

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.
- If you can make a profit by hoarding properties and renting them out, then the system is broken.
  Yea, to me, it seems like the root cause of this issue is capitalism, landlords existing is merely the symptom of the larger issue.
  
  It was always a mix of government and private businesses providing. But at some point the UK decided to leave it to Maggie Thatcher's vaunted free markets to pick up the slack.
  
  Arrested Development Narrator: They did not pick up the slack.

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.

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.

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.
- Especially those that own a couple houses as “investment”
  I agree, housing shouldn't be an investment. But I also think utilities should not be a "for profit" bussiness. I think clean air and water should be a human right, as with food. I think UBI should be a thing, basically most of capitalist stuff should go away.
  However, people in a capitalistic world we live in grew up and taught by society with the idea that everything you can legally buy is a legit investment. This isn't really the individual's fault, this is society's fault for telling everyone its okay to use housing, water, food, utilities, healthcare, and everything else, as a way to earn profits.
  Like I think we cant really blame any individual, but its the fault of capitalism as a whole.

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.

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.
- But... they are providing a service.
  
  I am a landlord, I'm sure I'll catch hell but whatever. I bought a dumpster of a house in a popular metro area and proceeded to pump $300k of my own money as well as doing half the repairs myself because I'm physically and mentally able. I also do all the maintenance on the property and I'm on a first name basis with the tenants. They call me for anything they need. Not everyone has the means to operate like this, but I don't suspect anyone in this thread will listen to those realities. I now own a house that is worth a decent amount more than my total investment so I rent it way below market rate because I have two awsome tenants living in symbiosis and I don't want them to leave (selfishly, because its more work for me). But I guess according to this thread I'm a leach. I'm tired of reading these childish black and white arguments, the world is inherently grey, nothing is simple and easy to boil down but everyone sure likes to try and make a simple agreement.
  
  i can paint over my own roaches, thanks. landlords are in inflating artificial scarcity of a necessity

As a leftist landlord, we mean all of them.

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?
- That's definitely not a great comparison 😂
  
  Property can be affordable or an investment, not both.
  Those using property as an investment are contributing to it not being affordable.
  
  All 4 mentioned parties are pieces of shit! ^Although ^2 ^of ^em ^are ^far ^bigger

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.

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.
- 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.
  Yea that makes sense. Under socialism, retirement funds would be guaranteed and their kids would have free university, and Universal Basic Income would guarantee money to survive even if they lose thier jobs.
  So its really just capitalism forcing people to do evil things to survive. Get rid of capitalism, and nobody (such as my aunt) needs to think of "being a landlord" as a way to survive.
  
  Essentially yes.
  We aren't blood thirsty ghoul's like right wingers will have people believe and even that sentiment goes to show the right wingers acting within their class interest as systemically its beneficial to appose the lower classes, socialists, communist and whatever label.
  As it is within my class interest to pay less rent.

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.
- Yes, apparently you are a parasite but not to worry you can afford your mortgage by offering a product or service on a temporary basis, for a fee.
  Edit: Is it that people have no sense of humor?
  
  No mortgage. My tenant said you're a moron.
- Kick them out, then you won't be a parasite.

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'm not disagreeing with you but I'm curious on how the housing would be freely accessible if the landlord hadn't bought it... are you saying the renter would have otherwise purchased their home?
  
  Market rates would be a lot lower if people weren't allowed to speculate on housing.

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?
- The argument would be, not saying I agree or disagree as I think it's more complex and nuanced than this, is that they are taking on the risk of maintaining and loaning a very expensive asset to somebody and hoping they'll look after it and pay that cost of borrowing it.

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.
- Exactly, buying and selling homes is a lot more time-consuming than ending and starting a lease. Also as an owner you have responsibility to declare/disclose any major problems to the buyer. If you're just moving out of a rental you may never even meet the next tenant. Rentals are always going to be a necessity, and people like your aunt are often the nicest people to rent from.
  
  I also know at least one person who prefers to rent an apartment because he doesn't want to mow the lawn or fix a faucet. He just called the superintendent.
- Some people need to rent, that does not mean individuals need to horde houses to rent out to them for profit.
  
  They may be what YOU are saying, but that is not what MANY here say. I've seen it many times that profiting on something essential for life is wrong/evil.

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.

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.
- My grandfather was a landlord back in the 80s-90s. He owned several small homes and duplexes in a big city, and he did all the maintenance and upkeep on them himself. I saw him work his ass off, how would his tenants paying him rent not be compensating him for his labor?
  
  I dunno about pricing back then but the issue is the amount of wealth that can be generated from a situation like that.
  Like, hypothetically, let's split your grandfather into two people. A landlord, and a maintenance guy hired to maintain those properties, getting paid a fair wage.
  Would the landlord make money, after paying a mortgage and his maintenance man?
  If the answer is no, then becoming a landlord isn't financially beneficial, and your grandfather could've just been a handyman, and made a steadier income, his money not directly dependent on whether or not someone paid rent.
  If the answer is yes, then your grandfather made more money than his labor was worth. While he earned money doing labor, the real issue is the money he earned by doing nothing. It's likely your grandfather made quite a bit more money than his labor was worth, given the fact that property management companies live entirely off of the price difference from labor put into housing and the price they can charge.
  Landlords are middlemen. They're used car salesman for houses. Are there landlords that aren't shitty? Yeah. My last landlord was awesome, he actually sold me the house I was renting, when I told him I was gonna buy a house and start my family. He was nice, reasonable, all those things. The total rent at the time (pre-covid, so a lot better than now, and split among 6 people) was 2250$, and my mortgage worked out to be 900$.
  Did your grandfather put effort in? Yes. Did he make money doing nothing? Also yes, the difference between what his labor was worth and what he got paid.
  That margin didn't come from his labor or his smart investments, it came from other people trying to live, and potentially created hardships. If his tenants could've paid for the actual cost of housing instead of whatever your grandfather charged, that might mean another kid got to go to college, a father getting to retire earlier, a family that could've worked 1 job instead of 2.
  Your grandfather is probably fine, he likely understood hardships and acted like a human being, but he still belonged to a class of people that are better off if they find ways to minimize the amount of money other people have. Some people judge others for taking what they don't need.
  
  It's not a coherent argument, people just don't like paying rent so they lash out in frustration. If you can't own you have to rent, if you have to rent you have to rent from someone. It's just a fact of life. Just like food is also a requirement to live and you need to pay someone for that too if you're not self sufficient. There's good people selling food and bad people selling food. It would be dumb to consider all food merchants evil in principle just as it's dumb to consider all landlords evil in principle.
- I honestly feel like when this issue comes up, everyone saying stuff like this is an alien. Do you seriously not know how much work maintaining property is? You say it's exploiting someone else's labor as though the several times a year every household needs work is, what, either worthless, unmentionable, or something people are owed by divine right? My parents owned some apartments and sound similar to OPs aunt. If anything, they were exploited by the people they bought them from (that aspect is a long story).
  They charged people under market rate, went out of their way all the time to be kind to people by doing things like driving half an hour to personally come pick up rent payments, letting people stay for a year without paying rent since they felt bad for them, went out to fix maintenance issues in the middle of the night, and the list goes on and on. They treated people better than any other landlord and worked their absolute asses off to make a profit (some years they took losses). It was only after a 20 year struggle, full of manual labor and dealing with difficult tenants, that they were able to sell the apartments and be free from the stress and be free of all of that manual labor. They basically cleaned toilets and replaced filthy carpet for people who would spit in their face for evicting them after a year of non payment.
  According to you and this thread, the people doing the spitting weren't morally bad or the lazy ones. Nope, it was my parents.

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.
- Have you considered, on the other side of that coin, if you don't have that money to be a parasite for doing little to no work at some point in your life, you're a parasite because you have nothing to contribute that anybody wants?
  Nobody needs to go without a place to live or be hungry and we can ALL fight to make sure that's the case, but don't be an entitled fucker in the crab bucket because you kinda suck at decision making.
  EVERYONE deserves a place to live, something to eat, medical care, clothes to wear, etc etc, but let's not be delusional: some people are taking shit they in no way shape or form contributed to receiving. So maybe don't be we don't toss around words like "parasite" when you need a handout, yeah?
  
  Public service can handle large scale renting situations, ensure that the lodgings are kept up to standard, and limit the ever increasing price of rent by not being profit-driven. Individual landlords that are out there making a profit on something that only gain value and usually requires minimal upkeep (that some don't even do) are parasites, plain and simple.
  But the concept of public services acting for the well being of others is not well understood in some countries, I guess.
- Rental property owners do not "make money off the backs" of anyone. It's about trading money for a service.
  
  Sure. Having the means to pay something once, and have it be repaid multiple times back with little to no expense, sometimes not even the bare minimum to remain "legal" housing, is a "service".

Individual landlords can be the worst ones. Here’s what that often looks like:
individual inherits a home
they rent it out and quit their job
the rent is their only income so they are really cheap about maintenance and repairs
they make any repair the tenant’s “fault” and force them to pay for it
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
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.
- I love how the fact checker rules the original post false... because there are fewer homeless people and more homes than the original Facebook post? Meaning that the waste is even more egregious than claimed? 🤔
  
  Right? 😂 Never fails to get a chuckle from me when I go to cite it.

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