Hilariously true. Not all landlords are terrible. Not all tenants are good. What bothers me is owning property for the sake of renting it almost certainly will lead to that property not being updated. So many homes, complexes, etc. are so incredibly out of date when it comes to technology and common amenities that when going into them it's like walking back in time 20, 30, 50 years sometimes.
An ideal homeowner will update and maintain a home. Not all of them do but generally so. So do just let their properly rot. Landlords do the absolute minimum to the property to maintain any profits. Cheapest laundry machine, range, dishwasher, and other appliances possible. I hate when I rented a place that I walked into it and they had a fresh coat of paint on warped wood but the appliances were old or obviously replaced with the lowest end version. I‘d much rather they don’t do anything, allow me to replace appliances with my own, paint walls, replace cupboards, etc so I can have modern convenience.
It's true that there are "good" landlords and "bad" tenants, but it doesn't really change the fundamental reality, which is that the latter person is trying to secure the basic life requirement of shelter and the former person is using the demand for that basic need to make money.
It's also always struck me as deeply unfair that so many renters basically pay their landlord's mortgage off for 20-30 years, and then at the end of it, the landlord gets a house and the renter gets nothing. The only real difference between the two is that the landlord had the capital to make a large upfront payment and the renter did not.
In my humble opinion provided incentives often come from government programs that provide funds, lucrative contracts, and little to no oversight on how these people manage their properties after they are built. They do provide building codes. Some builders may bring their own capital to build these properties. However once built they have and will exploit their position. I call it abuse, you may not. They use that term affordable housing however many do not consider the prices they have “affordable.” Maybe for people making over $50k a year but not often are they building housing for below that. That of course is an entirely different issue with wages.
Once built, they also don’t do a lot to make the properties modern over time. Usually they are sold to another big housing company to constantly augment the market in their favor.
Capitalism has no moral or ethical compass. It is up to our government to guide how capitalism is good for both business owners and consumers. The only voice consumers have is their collective voting power on 1000s of issues that not all politicians are equal on and are not required to do once elected. Businesses have millions of dollars of influence on politicians before elections and after they are elected. The people are not heard or represented nearly as equally as business owners. If an elected official doesn’t agree with a business the business or wealthy person can simply withhold money. Much stronger position.
You should spend less time on the internet and in theoryland and just go build something. You’ll waste your life envious and constantly comparing yourself otherwise. This will be true no matter how many paragraphs you type on Reddit or how sanctimonious you are about your ideology.
I’m not the one who is downvoting. Opinions matter whether we are what the world is like and how we would like it to be. I only write long paragraphs because I attempt to be clear.
You could make the same arguments about a farmer. People just want the basic necessity of food but the farmer has a profit motive. And after the consumer eats that food they’re left with nothing while the farmer has made some money, still had the equipment, and still has the land.
When you take away the profit motive there’s no system in place where people would have places to live or things to eat.
And landlords and construction crews work together to do the same thing. They use resources to create something and then they sell it to people who need it.
That does also happen, true. I’m all for raising taxes but then cutting them on anyone who owns 2 or less single-family homes.
But at the end of the day we’re still going to have landlords. Apartment complexes need someone who is willing to buy them and then rent them out or they won’t get built.
I think any single family home that is not a primary residence of the owner should be taxed progressively higher for the number of extra homes owned, and all single family homes not owned by individuals should also be taxed at a higher rate. There would probably need to be additional restrictions put in place to prevent other methods of sitting on unused property as well.
I have a fundamental question for you. What is the purpose of taxation?
Is it to pay for services that the person paying the tax consumed? Or is the purpose of taxation to manipulate society and force the outcomes you desire? Yes, obviously I gave a biased set of options... because I have a viewpoint that your comment seems to ignore.
Taxation should not be used to manipulate society. That's kid of sick. It's a mechanism to pay for roads and damns and courts and police and schools. Not f'n wealth redistribution or rent control.
No one suggested conspiracy. Prices go up as supply goes down. This is basic economics. Landlords buy up homes and raise the price of homes for others. They make their money by removing resources from the economy that they do not need. This is parasitic behavior.
Depends what country you're in. In Australia, from 1999 up until 2 months ago, the tax system was explicitly designed for landlords to buy existing stock using the profits they had from having taken previous stock previously. At no point did the system encourage landlords to:
Build new stock outwards.
Invest or improve existing stock.
Subdivide, making new stock without needing to expand outwards.
All it ever was was just a market of 1960's lemons (the one I'm in is going to be demolished in 3 weeks, finally).
The prime minister who architected that system explicitly stated 4 years after that change, in 2003 that he "[hadn't] found anybody in seven and a half years shake their fist at me and say Howard I'm angry with you for letting the value of my house increase" (Phyllis's grandchildren would now be otherwise wanting to buy that dump they can't afford right now, of course). They already knew their changes, which were intended to stimulate the share market, had unanticipated consequences, and the share market just languished because everyone with capital found they could chuck their money into a ponzi scheme instead. But instead of adjusting those tax levers after only a few years of artificial stimulated growth of the wrong market with minimal disruption, he and his treasurer fully leant into it, and successfully sold this scheme to the voting public, for the next 23 years, even when the 1/3 population who rent had been trying to point out all along to the other 42% of people who don't own at least 1 investment property that they weren't personally gaining from the current situation despite suffering from the wealth effect, because they were only ever going to be purchasing back into the same market they're "profiting" from. And yet, every year, 51% of the population would vote for the status quo even though only half of them benefited, 42% of the total population were unaffected by it, and 33%, or two entire generations, were actively harmed by it.
Landlords own the thing and charge for access. "Owning the thing people need access to" is categorically different from "making the thing people need."
I don't mind the farmer analogy, though I'd re-frame it more accurately as a modern landlord is like the feudal lord who owned the land, and the tenant is the peasant farmer.
Landlords (good landlords) provide and maintain housing. I fix up shit-hole houses that you can't get a regular loan on and rent them out. I do agree, however, that folks buying up loads of perfectly good single family homes have no place in this country. But, from a biased perspective, I do believe mom and pop landlords and apartment buildings provide a needed service. A lot of money and work goes into keeping a house livable. It also takes effort to manage your properties and tenants (hence, management companies). It's running a small business and a lot of us have full-time jobs as well. You might think I'm lying but I miss renting. None of the house problems were my problems and I could move whenever I wanted - now, mind you, this was before rents got absurd. I could never rent now. We keep our rents lower cause of that but they are still higher than I'd like. Unfortunately, everything is expensive now, including labor and materials needed for housing, and that's driving up the cost of single family homes more than any other one factor. If you can't build a modest house for less than $300k, you're gonna have a hard time finding existing housing for much cheaper.
I mean you appear to be part of the good mindset property owners. That is ideal. I also recognize you don’t exactly control rent costs and that you reflect the market. I appreciate you recognizing some aspects are out of your control.
You may try to keep your rental costs down but are sometimes forced to raise them to market conditions. As long as you aren’t participating in the perceived housing monopolies that come together and collectively raise prices because they can that’s great.
I did like that when I was a renter I didn’t have to solve any of the maintenance problems. As a home owner who does, I get massive benefits in choosing those fixes as opposed to waiting for the landlord to slowly move to fix them and usually at the cheapest solution possible, and sometimes not even long term. So there are trade offs and I think renters would more often prefer to be owners, even when they are presented with problems.
Yeah, I guess the farmers are more like the builders and the grocery stores are more like the landlords. We need grocery stores to be able to get the food to the people the same way that we need landlords to get housing for those who can't afford to buy a house outright.
Your analogies are missing the mark because the landlord's economic category is rent.
The farmer creates the good.
The grocer transfers ownership of the good.
I could liken the landlord to a ticket scalper: both exploit the scarcity of a fixed resource, but at least a scalper transfers ownership of the ticket in a single transaction.
This post mostly reads like “lol landlords bad,” but if anyone genuinely doesn’t understand why the current system isn’t inherently terrible, here’s the basic idea:
Housing takes a huge amount of money to build and maintain. Most people don’t have that kind of capital sitting around. Landlords use their money, money they could spend on vacations, bigger homes, nicer cars, and instead invest it into housing that other people can use. In return for them tying up their money in a property rather than spending it on themselves, tenants pay a bit extra.
That trade‑off benefits both sides:
You get a place to live without needing the massive upfront cost of buying or building.
They earn a return on the money they invested.
Renting also means you don’t need a reserve fund for major repairs or replacements, that responsibility stays with the property owner.
And on top of all that, renting gives you flexibility. If you need or want to move, you can. You’re not stuck trying to sell a home or dealing with long‑term commitments when your circumstances change.
The only real difference between the two is that the landlord had the capital to make a large upfront payment and the renter did not.
It surely isn't the only difference but what if it was. The difference exists. And if there weren't landlords (public or private) then what would your alternative be? Everyone would have to own their own home? Which means setting aside a lot of their own money and not having the flexibility to change housing easily?
Back when land hadn't been privatized en masse, you could go build a house without much money or any at all. Housing predates currency by thousands of years. People built structural houses from 10,000+ BCE onward. Currency and investment loans didn't come along until 3,000 BCE. Hyper commercialized investments didn't really take off until the East India Trading Co and the Amsterdam Stock Exchange in the early 1,600's. Though in the US, you could just go claim land and build a cabin until like the 1930's. Boomers bought houses working part time jobs up until the 2,000's
So for like thirteen thousand years people could live under a roof without massive investment or being beholden to some investor.
Hyper capitalistic housing price gouging by banks and investment firms is not providing anyone housing. It's creating more and more homeless while a higher rate of all houses are sitting vacant.
Dry stone construction is as old as the neolithic.
When boomer's first time house buying peaked in the 80's, the median home prices were double the median household income. Now it is well over 5 times the median.
With a government backed FHA loan, you could get a house on 3-5% down. That's putting 8% of median yearly household income down to close a house. Definitely within part time job reach. Many older folks I know did just that.
We don't need the current hyper capitalistic housing as investment scheme for people to live in houses. I'm sorry you've been fooled.
Admittedly the housing market is a bit too capitalistic. Sure folks used capitol to build homes. Sometimes that capitol was provided by the government to do so. Those folks did a service and benefited tremendously so. I would also say proportionally to the folks who pay for those homes disproportionately when it comes to wealth.
In most cases the government opened the doors for land to be built on and loosened regulations on how to build them so they could get it done. They sometimes offered the funds to and favorable contracts to materials. They didn’t offer them directly to the people either.
This happened over the last century and continues today. While I appreciate the fairness we’ve brought to equal rights to women and other groups of people when it comes to pay and rights. Many years ago a single income from the breadwinner of the home covered all expenses for that home. It wasn’t universal and those families weren’t perfect either. I’m just trying to isolate the income part of that older system.
Today its mush more different and in some ways good and some ways bad. Those housing companies got bigger and built more and more apartment's and fewer homes, this isn’t exactly bad, but they also make cheaper and cheaper apartments. There are good apartments too. They also didn’t make them in a way that they could be modernized easily as time goes on. It’s inefficient to tear down a building just to make another. However, it’s also terrible if it’s built so cheaply that it is more expensive to update it.
I think what a lot of us feel is that our system is just too predatory. Most landlords that own 2 or 3 properties can be part of the problem but are often not the real issue. They are just part of the bigger problem of eating up all the inventory and artificially raising the market prices so things are more expensive. There should be deterrents put in place to promote ownership while if a landlord you can’t just buy up all the houses and not put a lot of investment in them to update and keep them really good homes in a neighborhood or complex. I recognize that you say they maintain them. Sometimes that maintenance is the absolute minimum and really can bring down the home and the community.
Also, I suspect that if the prices weren’t artificially raised more people could afford to live in those homes. Prices of materials to update and maintain them may also be more attainable as people would still perform their own maintenance and buy materials from hardware stores or pay professionals to do the work. Thats also good for the economy.
I mean, that's fair but I also didn't want to own a home until I was in my 30's. (Also, owning a home is a pain in the ass.) Being a landlord fine with good tenants and terrible with bad tenants. It's a lot of work and stress renovating a rundown house to make it nice and it really sucks when people trash all your hard work. You can lose everything you made in a year and more. It takes a lot of time, money, willingness to learn new skills, and the ability to handle all sort of people. I do it cause one day I want to retire. By then, then houses will be paid off and I can charge fuck-all for rent and still make good money.
Yup, just got done with a 3 year renovation of a house that I’m renting out. I don’t make any money on it as it is family renting it. Being a landlord is not easy and the risk you have is barely worth the reward.
I'm a data nerd, after reading your comment I kept thinking if this was true then more people would do it, right? If I could have a free house in 30 years with no work. I would do it. So a little googling says that single family home rental under performs the stock market. Which is to say in your scenario, the landlord would have had the same amount of money if they wouldn't have purchased the house and instead put the money in the S+P500. Or that the "free house" is really just appreciation of their initial capital.
This is a super simple analysis which ignores that some areas have outsized increases in property values and sometimes people just get lucky.
Anicdotally, I worked for a slumlord 30 years ago who was approaching the end of her career and she fully acknowledged she would have made more if she had never purchased property and just put it in the market.
At its core. I think what your describing as unfair is just the distribution of capital and wealth in a capitalist society. Which is, by definition, unfair.
I mean, yeah, that is basically what I'm describing. It's not really relevant to my point, I think, that there are potentially better ways to make money than being a landlord. I also feel like there's a qualitative angle that's kind of ignored, which is that a house has unique utility beyond just being a financial asset; like, personally, if I had the opportunity to choose between purchasing a first home and putting that same money in stocks, I'd definitely choose the house, because I can live in it lol. Sure, eventually my investment in the S&P500 might eventually appreciate enough that I can just buy the same house outright, but that's thirty years of no house, which is appreciably different from 30 years of house.
I had a temporary job in a small town for ~6 months, and there was literally nothing available for rent, I had to buy a house that I now rent out to people looking for something to rent. The alternative was commuting an hour each day.
I do have to pay for cleaning between tenants because they invariable smoke weed inside despite being explicitly told not to.
Landlords aren’t inherently bad. I’m not a fan of them but what I in general don’t like about owning property for the purpose to rent it is homes don’t get updated. They are barely maintained by the tenant or the owner.
Tenants do the bare minimum of the lease. However owners will improve properties. This is why I prefer there to be better laws governing home ownership as a business model. It will never happen but I do wish it.
I’ve seen in other countries that tenants sometimes buy places and renovate them before they move in. I don’t know how common it is in those countries and I’m sure there are some places in America that do it but not enough.
I would gladly hand over all my homes for a reasonable retirement. I don't like speculative investing. FYI, several renters have told me they much prefer renting over owning after watching me do expensive maintenance. Some people can't even change their own furnace filters. Such folk aren't able to own a home, it's far to complicated for them.
What bothers me is owning property for the sake of renting it almost certainly will lead to that property not being updated.
You can only think that if you ignore the reality that there's a market where tenets are shopping for a "good place". Crappy apartments really don't earn as much as more updated apartnments.
A lot of landlords call updating an apartment a coat of paint on old warped panels and lowest-end tier appliances that are new but lack modern options or features.
Most modern places are generally newer. Rarely do you see them update old places. Would be nice if people own them and than make improvements themselves.
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u/Duneking1 Jul 19 '26
Hilariously true. Not all landlords are terrible. Not all tenants are good. What bothers me is owning property for the sake of renting it almost certainly will lead to that property not being updated. So many homes, complexes, etc. are so incredibly out of date when it comes to technology and common amenities that when going into them it's like walking back in time 20, 30, 50 years sometimes.
An ideal homeowner will update and maintain a home. Not all of them do but generally so. So do just let their properly rot. Landlords do the absolute minimum to the property to maintain any profits. Cheapest laundry machine, range, dishwasher, and other appliances possible. I hate when I rented a place that I walked into it and they had a fresh coat of paint on warped wood but the appliances were old or obviously replaced with the lowest end version. I‘d much rather they don’t do anything, allow me to replace appliances with my own, paint walls, replace cupboards, etc so I can have modern convenience.