this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So while I generally agree with your sentiment, there are some obvious ways that sometime could be an ethical landlord.

What if you have a house that's too big, so you convert a floor into an apartment? You're adding to the number of housing units available. Should you be forced to sell a portion of your house/building to whoever wants to live there? Or should you be able to rent it out to someone at a reasonable rate? Do we want rules that discourage people from potentially adding units to the market?

I feel like the "all landlords are evil" narrative is way too simplistic, and that simplistic view turns off people who would otherwise support reasonable limits on landlords and housing ownership. Like, it's obvious that we need limits and taxes on people who own multiple properties, and it's obvious that there are companies that exploit renters and drive up prices, but it's all more complicated than just "landlords evil lol".

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I rent my property because it's the only way I could've bought it at my age and I use that money to pay for the mortgage of it while I live somewhere I don't want to (under parent's wing in a crappy city) but angry people rarely if ever consider all scenarios

[–] Croquette 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Someone else is litteraly paying your mortgage for you because you cannot afford it otherwise. How out of touch do you have to be to say that with a straight face?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No, someone else is paying them to live in their house. He’s paying the mortgage off.

[–] Croquette 1 points 1 year ago

Same thing. He litteraly said that he could not afford the place, so he rent it out instead. So the renter is paying for the mortgage with extra steps.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So you're keeping home ownership away from someone who can afford to pay your mortgage is what you're really saying.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How did you come to this conclusion? If someone is renting it means they they can't pay for mortgage. Otherwise they would've done so. He said, that he needed to make a 20% payment to even get the mortgage. Idk how much money that was for him, but where I live that would be around 130k$. Clearly not everyone has that kind of cash.

And what's your solution? Disallow renting properties for which mortgage wasn't posted in full?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you buy it, live in it. Stop contributing to the housing crisis. Greed got us here, it certainly won't get us out.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So disallowing renting. So you don't control your property, which means you don't own it but lease it.

This is problematic, since not being able to open your house is worse than having difficulties with obtaining it. I agree that generally having some people own a lot of housing units is bad, but not being able to own a house means communism. And not as a scare, but quite literally, as in definition.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

If you buy it, live in it. That's not communism, that's taking control of a crisis. Feel free to rent out part of the house while you live in it, in fact some places are incentivizing exactly that. But owning multiple homes for profit is the problem, whether it's by corporations or "mom and pop" landlords. It's a problem we can and should fix.