No Stupid Questions

No raindrop thinks itself responsible for the flood.

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.

“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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

it is not possible to have a property as an investment, without screwing someone else over. So yeah, her too.

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.

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.

Houses aren't investments, so yes.

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.

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:

1. It lowers the housing stock in the area, so artifucial scarcity brings the prices up artificially.
2. 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
3. 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.