this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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Imo if you own more than the house you personally reside in, you can go to hell.
Pretty sad to see this kind of attitude. The problem IMO is buying with the intent to rent, and companies owning too much property. I rent, but I don't think that if you inherit something you're immediately a bad person until you sell it. Or if you bought something while single, once you move in with a significant other you're a bad person. I wouldn't have a problem renting from people like this either. There needs to be % cap on company rentals, and there needs to be a cap on private properties owned, but I don't personally think the number has to be 1.
Owning more property and being richer than me doesn't make someone automatically a bad person. People nowadays can only see black and white. We're so frustrated and tired of dealing with shit that we can't empathize with fellow human beings. Not everyone is a "real estate investment firm".
Exactly. That kind of comment serves to divide and distract us and while we are busy fighting over these relatively tiny sums, the ultra rich are getting richer.
The solutions you propose make way more sense.
I'm sure there are major issues with that idea as well, such as creating a rigid structure of sale and rental.
For example here, politicians made it very difficult to get kicked out if you rent a place for more than 2 years. You basically have to agree to move out. All that did is make virtually all landlords only lease for 2 years because it's hard to get rid of a bad tenant after that. It's a great thing if you can get it, but it sucks to have to move that often.
If you limit the % property for rent in a city, maybe companies will build turbo shit apartments (or extremely expensive apartments) for sale, and decent apartments for rent. The monkey paw is strong.
What possible reason does anyone have to own a second home other than to act as a middle man by renting it out? Fuck middle men. They help nothing but themselves.
I gave 2 good reasons why someone would have a second home. If you mean purpose, not everyone who owns a second home rents it out, and not everyone who rents it out is doing it for fat profit.
My uncle owns 2 homes. One he bought with my aunt, and one he inherited. His brother lives in the second home for various reasons and his end of the deal is that he takes care of it. I have another uncle who bought a studio apartment with my aunt maybe 30 years ago, and they mortgaged a new apartment some years ago, when my cousin got too old to sleep in one room with them. They rent out the studio to college students for what I think is a fairly low price. One of them is now retired and they've got a good chunk more time to pay on that mortgage and prices have skyrocketed in their area. If shit goes south financially, they have a backup place to live in their old age.
I'm an immigrant myself and I can tell by the way prices are going here, I'm going to need to find a spouse to mortgage an apartment if I want to buy anything. I don't think anyone in those situations is some kind of monster for not selling me their second home.
I think a remote vacation home or cabin or whatever is also a legitimate reason to own 2 properties. I also think hotels and motels fall under owned property, and I think those are legit too.
Like I said, IMO the problem is with people hoovering up properties specifically to inflate prices and to make profit by doing nothing. It's rentseekers and bad landlords, not multi-home owners.
Edit: the relationships here read kinda weird. Both uncles are "by alliance", married into the family. Of course, they both share ownership of the stuff they bought with my aunts, but idk how the inheritance works, and I'm not gonna ask. The way it's phrased in the family is that he inherited that house in the countryside and his brother (which is like distant family to me I guess) lives there.
There is utility in renting out a space to live in.
Like, even in an ideal scenario it isn't really feasible to sell your house and buy a new one every time you move, if you move around frequently enough.
The problem is when buying a house isn't an option for the vast majority of people who don't move around that much.
Of course, but who owns more... Idk what to call them. Second homes? Additional homes? And how long are they owned for? Who is causing the 'shortage' as it were? Is it people who own one or maybe two extra homes, or is it companies who own 10-story, village sized apartment buildings that they rent out? What about Airbnb property scoopers?
I don't have an answer to that, and I'm guessing it differs by city, country, region. I'm not arguing everyone who owns a second home is an angel. I disagree with the thread source comment that paints all 2-home owners as evil.
No second helpings until everyone has grabbed a plate policy.
Sell the house
What if it's a new couple of two homeowners who move in together, should they sell one property before the relationship solidifies?
What if the grandchildren are in secondary school when Nana dies, is the family allowed to hold on to this second property for the few years until the kids move out/in?
What if you accept a contract position in another town, should you be forced to sell and buy, or is it okay to rent out the home you have and rent another elsewhere?
My point is that there is nuance at the lower end of the scale, and the enemy is big corporations and landlords of massive portfolios.
The other flipside is that individual landlords aren't necessarily going to be any better than larger corporate landlords--for every individual landlord that rents their Nan's home at cost and keeps rent lower than inflation, there's probably at least one other landlord that jacks rent up year over year, drags their feet on maintenance, and tries to screw you out of your deposit when you move out. (The ones who do this usually tend to leverage their income into more property and turn into a slum lord, though, so the rule of thumb of 'don't make it your only job' still largely applies.)
The real core of the issue is that we haven't built any new public housing for well on 2 decades by now, and the market has decided that the only new housing we should build are million dollar McMansions that squeeze into lots that would previously hold a much smaller house with a decent yard.
What should be done is a massive investment in public housing at all levels of government to fill in the missing demand for low-cost housing, but we've been so collectively conditioned by four decades of Reagan-era "Government is not the solution, it is the problem" neoliberal thinking that the odds of this ever happening is roughly on par with McConnell agreeing to expand the supreme court and eliminate the electoral college.
Bad Faith Arguments, LLC
As an example of the problem, no one in my entire social circle has any hope of ever owning property, and many of us are just barely skirting homelessness. Unfortunately this is extremely common in the same world where some people own multiple homes. If you found yourself in that situation, I imagine the best course of action depends on where you live, but a good choice might be to convert your property into a non-equity low-income housing cooperative. There are lots of other options though, the main thing is just to get it into the hands of people who need it.
The only hope I ever have of owning property is my mum dying :(
And even then, she currently owns the property, not the land, so there's still land rent
Property is land. Do you mean that she owns the building?
Leasehold is a type of property where you rent the land for a really long time (decades), and build your house on it. Every few years you extend the lease so it has no risk of running out. You don't know how much the landlord will charge you, or indeed if they extend, although there are some legal protections for leaseholders.
This tbh
What if I have a secret family?
I kind of find it funny that people on Lemmy are so strictly against owning multiple houses, while it was completely ordinary for many people in my country (Croatia) to own two houses while the country was under literal socialist government (Yugoslavia).
Was housing guaranteed in Yugoslavia? If everyone was guaranteed at least a shitty apartment, it would explain why there was less hate towards those who own several houses.
There wasn't hate, period. I find it a foreign and even anachronistic mindset, I'd sooner expect people here to be simply jealous of those better-off. Also, owning several houses, not just two, could be problematic, the govt would probably try to nationalise some of them, at the very least in the early period.
I don't know the details of how it was all managed, housing wasn't definitely guaranteed (SFRY had a rapid urbanisation of the population, and apparently it wasn't easy to meet the demand for new housing), but overall the rate of homelessness was quite low, in part also thanks to the culture that didn't mind large families living in a single house.