High speed rail such a great way to travel medium distances anyway it’s downright criminal the US hasn’t figured it out yet.

That’s an idiotic take

Learn skills that will be easily transferable across countries. Look for a country you would like to live in, learn the language if necessary, research where they are hiring.
Do it before Trump’s third term, there will be a lot more chaos then

Nah. I’ve been renting where I’m at for over a decade. My landlord has been amazing. I’ve had times where I’m out of work and he’s allowed me to be 2 months late paying, I’ve had hard times and he’s helped out, he let’s me do what I want with the place and he foots the bill. He’s also only raised my rent in that 11 years by 125$. I’ve also seen his house, and it’s worse off then mine. My truck is better then his as well. Not all landlords are the same. Some actually do want to help as much as they can.

Based

Socialized housing isn’t an overnight project. It starts with regulating the current housing marketing and prioritizing the take down of corporate slumlords. It starts with revising zoning laws, promoting higher density housing and multifamily homes, and creating walkable and accessible neighborhoods for all.

I get the idealism from Lemmy, but this is also it’s pitfall. Anything less than a leftist utopia is not worth working towards, and so we sit in righteous inaction.

Housing is a human right, not an investment.

Yes and yes 1000%

Nationalize housing

Fuck no.

both of them see reduced profits when minimum wages are increased

But one doesn’t have to act in the shareholders best interest.

My friends are renting in an apt from a mom and pop landlord who hasn’t raised the price in years - they roughly play half of what market price is at this point.

So sure, the direction of Mom and pop landlords interests may be the same as a corporate landlords, but that are under much less pressure to leverage that.

I’m glad you’re a human with empathy and good intentions, but tenants shouldn’t be in a position that their housing (one of the most fundamental rights of people) relies on the good will of whatever landlord they happen to be stuck with.

One of the saddest things about Gaza is how many people lost their property investments. It will take years for the real estate market to pick up again 😔

I should’ve known better than to trust my intuition on this. I previously ran the numbers on investing vs double mortgage payments and found investing to be far superior.

People who don’t own homes don’t understand just how expensive and time consuming it can be. And most of that money and work doesn’t go towards building equity.

Those costs are included in the rent.

I know you mean well here, but this is fully bonkers. This is not how friends behave with each other.

They absolutely don’t owe me shit. We lived with them for a month before they moved, all in same house, for free. So there’s money we didn’t spend right there. We shared meals, shared hangovers, and shared their other friends in a place we were just moving to, which is priceless. But if you’re still really worried about money, they sold us their car for well under KBB as well. The guy’s brother and mom were who we called when stuff broke, and who brought us pupusas randomly when they were in the neighborhood. We trust them and they trust us, so we aren’t going to fuck up their house, and we got landlords that respond to shit immediately. I’m not going to ruin a 20+ year relationship with some tankie notions about “oh, bro, you owe me home equity.” And you can trust that anyone doing something like this knows when they have a good thing going without having to explain details.

O-kay. I can think of a myriad of other reasons than sheer cost why I might not want to buy a home straight away. But I see how the graphic kind of makes sense in the way you describe.

I’m not a big fan of landlords, by the way, and the instant downvoting for asking a simple question is extremely rude. Doesn’t exactly foster community engagement, guys! 😑

It’s only a parasitic financial relationship when the rented property is on the hands of a private owner. We could totally have collectively/publicly owned housing rented at maintenance costs, which would 100% remove the exploitation and parasitism

How would you reduce the hassle of apartment ownership? I’m thinking of the issues of having to make a large financial investment, find an apartment you’re happy to do that for and finding a new buyer for that apartment when you want to move elsewhere in a reasonable time and for the right time. And then there’s the worry about renovations to the building and other such (sometimes sudden and unexpected) financial burdens.

With renting you can just rent for a while, not comnit to anything and even use that time to look for the apartment you want to actually own. And if they find out that the pipes are in much worse condition than assumed, you can just say sayonara and move to next place.

No thanks. I’ve lived in 6 different US states in the past 6 years. I understand I’m an extreme edge case, but I’m a huge fan of renting apartments at this stage in my life.

Now maybe in this hypothetical society with better housing and whatnot, I wouldn’t have felt the need to hustle and grind and work my way up the corporate ladder and move around as much as I did… But for my situation, yea I like renting

You’re describing the Soviet model of housing. Flats were often assigned by the union of the worker, and the rent dues were about 3% of the monthly income, which paid for basic maintenance. Homelessness was eliminated and housing was constantly improved through the construction of literal millions of housing units per year, more than any country at the time.

Urban planning was also cool, organized in so-called “Mikroraion” (microdistricts) with accessibility on-foot to basic services being the core of planning. Green spaces, health centres, childcare and social activities were all within a 15-minute walk (the neighborhoods in most Eastern Block countries retain these features with whatever services haven’t been dismantled in capitalism). Quality affordable public transit (e.g. Moscow metro) also ensured mobility.

Companies do both. Whether it’s for renting or ownership can depend on municipal rules or some economics from the company, wouldn’t know that well. Renting might also be easier for the company, easier to find tenants than buyers in some situations

Ahahah thanks for clarifying 👍

Yes. If you’re not actively using the land you should sell it - if that were the general practice, many renters would be land owners themselves and an entire layer of middle management would evaporate.

But this is a fundamentally flawed analogy. Renting is not scalping. If you want to criticize specific practices like predatory leases or speculative hoarding, that is a fair and nuanced position. But claiming that renting itself is inherently exploitative ignores how markets function.

Just because something is a necessity does not mean it can be free. Food, water, electricity, heating, and medicine are all essential, yet we still pay for them. Not because we should, but because we have to. These goods and services come from complex systems that require capital, labor, infrastructure, and logistics. Every step costs money. To keep these systems running, consumers have to pay enough to cover those costs and allow for future investment. That payment can come through taxes in public systems or through private transactions in the market. Either way, the cost is real and unavoidable.

Housing is no different. Building homes is expensive. It requires land, materials, skilled labor, permits, and time. Buying a home is a major investment, and renting exists as a practical alternative. Not everyone can or wants to buy, and renting provides access to housing without the upfront burden of ownership. There’s a huge luxury rental market for wealthy people, even though they have the means to buy houses. This means that there are real advantages to renting that go beyond just not being able to buy a house.

Like any market, housing is shaped by supply and demand. When supply is low and demand is high, prices rise. That is not exploitation. It is basic economics. If you want to make housing more affordable, the solution is not to vilify landlords or pretend rent is evil. The solution is to increase supply. Build more homes. Reform zoning laws. Encourage development. More housing means more competition, and more competition drives prices down. We know this formula works. We’ve seen it work countless times. Actually we’re seeing it work right now. Take a look at Austin and how they’re rental and housing prices have been dropping considerable over the years. That is how you fix the imbalance. Not by attacking the existence of rent, but by addressing the root cause of scarcity.

Uhh, I hear people complaining about those services all the time, see Air BnB.

The complaints are about the scale of people who are opting to turn their units into Airbnbs, which takes them off the rental market, which deceases supply, and thus increases prices. You’ll almost never hear somebody complain about how someone turning their property into a hotel is an inherently bad idea.

You can acknowledge the benefits to renting while also acknowledging it’s an unbelievably toxic and abused system that profits off the poor for the gain of the rich.

I disagree with this premise. I don’t think that renting is inherently toxic, abusive, or exploitative. There’s no valid argument to argue as such. Property is a commodity, those who have excess of this commodity are opening it up for others to use for a fee. That’s a service, and just like any other service there’s nothing wrong with it. I also think that you’re misguidedly assuming that only poor people rent, which is not true. There’s an absolutely massive luxury rental market as there is one for every budget and style. It truly is a market, and like all markets, it’s still dictated by the law of supply and demand.

I think the crux of our disagreement stems from the fact that I think our housing crises stem from poor and outdated policy, not from an economic system. Capitalism has been proven to be extremely effective at efficient mass production, so why is this not the case for housing? It’s because we have backwards housing policy. It takes years, sometimes even decades, for any developer to get their project approved. It takes a lot of money to go through all the legal proceeding, lawsuits, fees, and demands made by the town/city. Even if the developer finally gets to the point where they can finally start building, they’re still now allowed by law to build mixed units or multifamily units, they have to build either single family homes or strip malls. Not only that, but a big percentage of the property has to be dedicated to parking spaces, again this is by law. Even if the developer complies with all these nonsensical laws, demands, pays the fees, and spends years going through the process… the whole thing can be killed at any moment by NIMBYs for the dumbest reasons. This is why we have a housing crises.

You want to fix the housing market? Do what Austin has been doing for the past decade. For whatever reason, it seems like they’re only ones in the country who figured out that if they make the development process easier, reform their zoning laws, and incentivized developers to build, they can build so many new units that they supply of housing not only meets demands by exceeds it, thus leading to a decrease in prices. Austin has seen pretty substantial decreases in both rents and house prices, and the trend is not slowing down (source). The average rent of a 2 bedroom apartment there is around $1400, which is well below the national average of $1630 (source). Keep in mind, that Austin is a big and growing city, and yet they’re prices have nearly dropped to prepandemic levels. Clearly they’re doing something right, and the rest of us need to follow their lead.

That’s sounds to me like a way more grounded, nuanced, practical, and realistic plan and approach than just simply insisting that renting as a concept is bad because Marxism insists that capitalism is bad, and therefore we should get rid of it and replace it with a system that’s proven to be worse. A rigid ideology that’s built on a house of cards made up of baseless assumptions and relies and the most extreme option at every turn shouldn’t have any place in modern discourse.

In my area, the majority of homeless have cars. A car rental can be more important than a home to rent for survival for more people than you might think.

The reason why I argue and obsess about landlordism is that housing is a human right

So is food and water, but we still pay for them. It doesn’t take an economist to understand that it takes a lot of capital and labor to get these things to us, and these require money. Therefore, they have to be traded for to cover the costs. In this case, it’s by paying a fee.

It’s also important because of how much pressure it exerts on workers, very often 40% of a person’s income goes to rent, which is absurd and destroys the quality of life of many people, and perpetuates poverty cycles.

This is ignorant because it assumes that rental market is static, when in fact, it is very much dynamic. How expensive or affordable rent is depends on things like supply, demand, and policy.

it’s not like any other service since landlordism essentially doesn’t require work

Who told you this? This is just wrong. This is the issue with Marxism as an ideology, it’s entirely a built on a house of cards. It’s entirely on baseless assumptions built on other baseless assumptions. Simply insisting that landlords don’t do anything without providing any substance is not a valid argument, that just the assertion fallacy.

Landlord do actually do stuff. They’re responsible for their property. This means they have to put in the work in maintaining it, not only to preserve their property’s value, but also because they’re liable if their property causes harm to their tenants or anybody else. Landlords are responsible for things like

• Repairs for any structural decay, damage, or malfunction (this ranges from changing light bulbs to changing the entire heating system)

• General maintenance like snow removal, pest removal, the general appearance of the building

• All the legal mumbo jumbo like drafting up the leases, following regulations, and meeting safety standards

• All the finances of the building, this is especially true for multifamily buildings. They have to pay for the sewage and water, because they’re shared by the whole building as well as the common electricity (usually has it’s own panel). They also have to deal with the hassle of paying the taxes and house insurance on the building.

• Tenant relations, again this is especially true for multifamily buildings. Landlords have to be able to settle disputes and complaints between their tenants, and they have to be willing to take legal action against tenants that are causing harm to the others

This is all stuff that tenants would have to personally deal with if they owned property, but because they’re renting all of it get outsourced to the landlords. However, all of these involve the tenants actually being in the building. If there’s a vacant unit, the landlord is also responsible for inspecting the unit, cleaning it, advertising the vacancy, screening applicants, and signing the new tenants.

You might scoff at this as nothing, but it’s actually really annoying time consuming. So much so that there’s an entire industry that revolves around property management. There’s a reason why even rich people sometimes opt to rent instead of just buying a new place. To some people the hassle of owning and maintaining a property is just not worth it.

We Marxists also famously have problems with commodity production, it’s quite literally the core of Marxism: that the labour of workers is unfairly appropriated by capital owners.

I’m aware, and Marxism is also famously well known for falsely believing that labor is the only source of value in an economy when that’s just not true. Labor is just one component in the economy, not the only one. An economy needs capital, leadership, entrepreneurship, specialization (education/expertise), and innovation on top of labor to function.

As for renting having its advantages, Marxists don’t deny that, and are very much in favour of social rent, that is, publicly owned housing rented at maintenance costs. This way, there is no relationship of exploitation between a landlord and a tenant: you can just rent one of the collective houses without your wealth being used for anything other than its average maintenance cost. For example in the Soviet Union workers rented housing at about 3% of their income.

It’s funny you say this because this show that you actually have no idea what you’re talking about. Three things:

1. Soviet workers didn’t have a normal income like we do. Their incomes were centrally planned by the government, and they were distributed as a part of national budgeting scheme. Soviet incomes were not based on merit, demand, experience, or specialization but on administrative policy. This means that a doctor and a factory worker got paid a similar amounts, and Soviet salaries were notorious for being very low.

2. The Soviet Union actually set the rents via policy. A part of the reason why the predetermined government salaries were so low is because so many things were heavily subsidized, including housing. That was the government’s grand argument as to why people got next to nothing, they argued that they’re getting benefits elsewhere. Now, the government decided they would impose a symbolic 3-6% (depends on the regions) rental fee to remind people that housing was allocated, not owned, and could be revoked and reassigned at any time.

3. The Soviet Union solution to housing is one of the most historically famous examples of failure. They central government was very inefficient and ignorant in their planning. They allocated a lot of resources to build factories but barely any for houses for the workers that moved there, they set out of touch housing quotas that did not align with local needs, and they were rigid and uncoordinated in their execution which led to a lot of poor quality buildings and a lot of delays. The buildings that did get built were plagued with mismanaged, poor maintenance, and extremely long wait lists. You might not know this, but the Soviet housing model that you idolize actually had a lot, and I mean a lot, of housing shortages. That system collapsed for a reason.

Keep in mind, I am not against the idea of public housing. I do think that government has role to play in helping solve the housing crises. There are some people who lack the means to ever get housing on their own regardless of how affordable the market is, and those people should get government subsidized housing. However, this means that public housing should only apply to a specific subsection of the population, not the whole population. Trying to centrally control and plan the housing market will just lead to a fiasco similar what the Soviet Union experienced. That’s a not a real solution, that’s just introducing a host of unnecessary problems.

Our current system works, it’s been proven to work. What it needs is some tweaks and updates to get it back on track. It’s really not that complicated, we have a housing shortage, so we need to build way more houses. We want lower prices, so have to build so many units that the supply eclipses the demand. We want more dense, less car centric housing, then we have to update our zoning laws to allow it. We want to speed things up, so we have to remove obstacles standing in the way like unnecessarily long approval processes for new construction.

We can’t cling on to failed ideologies like Marxism as some sort of new and innovative solution, because it’s not. Marxism is a proven failure, and that won’t change this time or the next. If we want to get anything done we have to remain practical, nuanced, realistic, knowledgeable, precise with our discourse and policy. That’s our only way forward.

We are not against the idea of renting, we are against the idea of renting from a private owner that extracts wealth unfairly from the tenant

You never explained why you think this is the case, you just insist that it is by constantly repeating it. Tell me the specific mechanics that you believe make private renting inherently unfair or exploitative, because I don’t see any legitimate case for this position.

Just wanna point out that both BlackRock and your average landlord gramma have exactly the same class interests in fighting against rent control, rent freeze, or construction of affordable social housing.

I understand what their ideology is, I’m making the point that it’s stupid and illogical.

I personally think it’s a bit melodramatic. There’s a world of difference between renting your spare room, or the 2nd floor of your house, and a hedgefund buying 20,000 single family houses.

I agree with you, but that’s also kind of my point. I don’t have an issue with nuanced takes like this. There’s clearly a difference between mom and pop landlords who own duplexes or a second house to help them out and Blackrock buying up entire neighborhoods to purposefully manipulate market prices. We can agree that the former is fine, and the latter isn’t. But at the same time we can also acknowledge that the issue is not inherent to markets, private ownership, or renting, these bad practices are a byproduct of poor policy.

That’s definitely a factor, but our housing supply is largely self inflected with outdated and poorly thought out zoning laws. Developers can’t build anything because the process to build anything takes years (sometimes decades), a fuck ton of money before they even break ground, and the law requires literally requires them to dedicate a certain ratio of their property (sometimes half) for parking. Not only that but so many projects get easily killed by NIMBYs for dumbest reasons. It’s no wonder we have shortage.

If we look at places that are building a shit ton of units, like Austin, the prices are actually going down and have been for years. Both the rent prices and house prices have gone down in Austin because, for whatever reason, they’re the only ones that figured out that the way to solving a housing crises is to pump the supply to the point where it exceeds demand, thus causing prices to fall. That’s what we need nationwide.

Marxists don’t have a problem with renting per se, we have a problem with private landlords renting to extract a profit from less wealthy individuals. Social/public renting is cool and I have 0 problems with it, and I thing we should favour it.