this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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Look I'll be honest, as a renter, I've not heard a realistic alternative that I like better. Do I think landlords should be better regulated? For sure. Do I think housing should be a right, and free, high quality housing should be available everywhere to anyone who wants it? Yes, please!
I like the option to rent a place that's even better than what the baseline option would be. I like that I can move around as I need to. I like that I can get a bigger, better, or just different, place when I have the funds. I like that I never have to deal with broken appliances or roof repairs and get to pick the type of place I want to live in.
Do it 1970s style. You own a home but pay less than half of what you do now. The extra savings go toward home maintenance and lifestyle improvement. You gain equity over time and actually get something for what you paid instead of lining someone else's pockets.
Preach!
It really depends on how often he is really using that "I want to move" option.
Various fees associated with the purchase of a houae will blow away likely equity gains over a year or two. Over a short time period housing can actually go down, and you sell for less than you paid. Selling the house is a potential exposure that may leave you stuck for months with it, and if you needed to immediately move, you have to own two properties and the associated taxes, insurance, and likely loan payment. If you had to borrow and moved within a year. The interest owed probably outpaced your theoretical equity gains.
So if you are only staying in one place for say 4 years or less, renting may actually make sense. If you are planning longer than that, purchasing almost always makes more sense.
The time cost, too. Huge hassle to buy, move, sell. Inspections, agents, viewings… big pressure end to end.
I remember the San Francisco Bay Area threw this old truism off when purchasing became so expensive, it was just about a wash whether you wanted to rent or buy.
These tiny little homes starting at a million bucks or something…
You make a really good point, thank you.
Honest question because I just don't know - would those same financial and temporal costs (mentioned in another comment) still be as high in a functional, fair system?
buying doesn't make sense unless you live in a place for 5-10 years.
i am now 5-6 years into my place. it is just starting to 'profit' in terms of equity vs costs.
renting is cheaper and better and has far fewer opportunity costs. i had way more disposable income as a renter and a lot more free time. i see no 'shame' in being a renter, but there is a lot of dumbass cultural bias that 'owning' is always better than renting.
same is true for cars. but people love to flip out at you for how 'stupid' leases are. cars are deprecating assets... which makes it an even stupider argument. but leases can be really great if you know what you are doing and your circumstances. leasing worked out great for me and i ended up buying my car out and making a hefty profit off it. some leasing deals are actually far better than owning the car, too.
most people just look at upfront costs and end costs. they don't see all the costs in the middle. hence why they buy a crappy car like a Jeep, when they should lease it... and end up boned from all the maintenance bills. a house is a lot more than the cost of buying it and the cost of selling it.
I will say that as an owner, I have a lot more disposable income and pretty much all the free time I had as a renter.
I paid of my mortgage early, so now that's just on the ground.
House maintenance is a thing, but it's not as scary as people sometimes act like it is. Cleaning is far more work than maintenance/repairs and I had to do that either way. I have had three relatively big repair bills that I had to pay for, but that's over decades, and I could have paid a company some monthly fee if I wanted more predictability (though the home warranty companies tend to be scammy). I have a lawn to mow, but that's more a function of detached housing rather than renting/owning, renters of detached housing have to mow their lawn too, and a friend who owns a townhouse doesn't mow but has to pay big HOA fees that include landscaping services.
But absolutely, between closing costs and interest rates and risk of the housing market having a short-term dip, you aren't going to reliably and meaningfully gain equity in under 5 or 4 years. One could make a persuasive argument that a different system wouldn't have that much overhead to a purchase, but within the system we have, that's the timeframe where owning doesn't make any sense.
Of course, that said, there needs to be healthy choice in the market, so that people aren't stuck renting when it doesn't make sense for their situation.
It entirely depends on the house. Some people get bankrupted by their homes, some get really lucky and have very low maintenance costs. When I rented I had something like 60%+ disposable income.
Sounds like you are very economically well-off, and you can likely afford to outsource your labor and upkeep. I could not. I had more free money and time when I rented because I cannot afford to higher maids, landscapers, and etc. I do almost every minor repair myself, including plumbing and electrical and I absolutely dread the day I will have to replace a roof or do another very costly repair and it sucks to have to have a pile of money I have to keep aside for that, when I'd rather use it for something enjoyable. Owning a home has seriously impacted my ability to vacation and travel in both terms of money and time to the point I haven't left the country in 5 years. I am 'wealtheir' on paper, but that wealth doesn't do much for me in my day to day life. My 8 grand a month income does less for me than my 2 grand a month income did for me 10 years ago, because so much of it is sunk into my home.
I suppose the question is what upkeep people get hit with that a renter doesn't. Housekeeping isn't a renter amenity and landscaping is not an amenity when you rent a house.
Maybe the house is older or something... In my car the three things were a leaky water heater, a roof (which was big, but 15 years and insurance partially covered), and the central air conditioning falling. Day to day haven't had plumbing or electrical problems. I suppose I've had to replace a few parts of my toilets, but just flappers which are like a 15 second job and a few dollars and fill valves, which take about 5 minutes and are maybe 15 dollars. Some folks seem to think that every weekend there's another repair, but for me it can be months and months before even a minor thing like a light bulb or a toilet flapper needs attention.
do you want all the negative externalizes of 1970s too? like leaded gasoline? a much more racist and sexist and hateful society? only 3 major tv stations and no internet?
What does that have to do with affordable housing?
You are describing either a "land contract" or a "condominium". With either, you gain equity in the property.
Why would you prefer a landlord to just you save that money yourself? Like at best its probably a third of your income if youre working class? At worst its probably 60% or more. If you're on any kind of social assistance rent is probably almost all of your income. Hurray! No food for you mister, the poor landlord needs that pittance you receive.
You would have effectively 133%-180% of the income you do now. For me that's an increase of over a thousand dollars a month. I could afford all the appliances and roof repairs in the world with that kind of money. I would still walk away with so much extra money its a joke. You have been entirely misled about how much rent takes out of your income. They will steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from you over your life time, maybe even more depending on what you pay.
Renting exists because renters cannot advocate for themselves. It exists because people who become land owners escape the renting class and pretty much immediately turn their backs on it. No longer their problem. Because propaganda has taught them to not have solidarity with their fellow workers. Homelessness is an entirely preventable issue and is inseparable from the problem of landlords.
This comment illustrates very clearly that you are not a renter 😊 we do not have a choice! I cant just decide whether or not to own my own shelter. I am literally not given the choice. That is not how the system is designed. If youre disabled, youre screwed. If you cant afford a higher education, youre screwed. If you have debts, mental health issues, if youre a minority, youre absolutely screwed. You will rent for the rest of your life and it will almost entirely be spent paycheck to paycheck, certainly nowhere even close to daydreaming about owning any kind of home.
All the benefits youre ascribing to renting count for just owning the apartment or condo you live in. Bam. Done. Couldn't give less of a fuck about grass. I can barely afford food! Think about how insane it is for you to complain about having to cut the grass when renters have to pick between fucking eating and having a place to sleep. Youre not a leftist, youre a bog standard liberal.
I do not live in the USA. Housing is a human right and should be free everywhere. It should not be a market. No one should have to pay anything for housing. You have been fed a lifetime of propaganda to make you believe this is fair. It is not. It is one of the major things that contributes to lifelong stress and shortens lifespans. It is one of the major things that keeps people in poverty, having to pay half their income in rent that they never get back.
life isn't fair.
some people have to rent forever, yes. some people are ok with renting forever. If you want to not rent forever you need to make lifestyle or career changes such that you are on an economic path to doing so. That might involve some short term difficulty.
You had choices. You made them. I grew up in a poor town, with working class parents. I choose to go to college, by studying my ass off and getting scholarships and loans. Then I chose to pay back those loans as fast as I could once I got a job after graduating. By 30 I was debt-free. by 35 I was able to buy a modest place. I did not choose high-paying job either, I work in non-profit research where my salary is about half what it might be if i worked for a corporation.
Not everyone chose that. I have had many friends who choose otherwise, and are now 40+ with mountains of debt and will rent forever and are bitter about it. But they also used to tell me what a loser i was for not traveling partying and 'living it up'. And they are still doing that. One person I know makes 40K a year working in a bicycle shop, and yet they spend 5-8K traveling each yeah, and they feel like someone should just give them an house and are super angry at the world. if you dare suggest maybe they stop working in a bike shop and get a better career, they tell you you are a hateful fascist.
and on the flip side I know people making 500K+ a year who also say they can't afford to buy a house, because they have delusional expectations. and refuse to 'lower' themselves by buying something in their price range.
Man FUCK YOU as someone who does alright now but struggled you really just love the smell of your own shit and pulling up the ladder behind you. Fuck you how about you just shut the fuck up instead of posting this absolute drivel
You know what's worse than "becoming a slave to [your] house"? Having to work as to not become homeless.
First things first: there are already a bunch of people who don't have to work for their housing. A big part of those may have to work for an income so that they can pay for upkeep. But get rich enough and that can get payed by dividends. Or they're landlords who get enough income from rent. Those rich people don't have to work at all for their housing.
That's cool for the people who get it. But I'd be surprised if your home country has no homeless people and vacant housing at the same time.
Do those people on social programs actually have a comfortable life, though? Or is it rather "too little to live, too much to die"? I'm quite sure that landlords still make a lot of profit from rent in that country.
Introduce a usufruct model of owning, where the people who live in a home actually own it (either as a family home, or multiple homes owned by a coop). The important bit is that rent-seeking is abolished in housing. Then you might still need to work for upkeep, but that's a diminishino part of what people need to pay for rent, nowadays.
If your country is capitalist, I highly doubt that they will implement this. Profits are still required by capitalist states.
I said "work as to not go homeless". You're bringing "paying" into it. There's already a lot of place to live. Ideally, I'd see a communist society where this kind of stuff is planned on the basis of needs, rather than being speculated on in markets for profit
I'd be happy to hear which country isn't currently capitalist. And the other thing is less of an assumption and more of a rule.
... the people who live there own it. Capitalism would require the ability to keep others from using the house while you don't use it. You wouldn't be able to sell the house/appartment.
Your family requires a place to live, doesn't it? You're describing capitalism, btw. Why should your family be thrown out if they still need the house?
The community built it. Or it was already there (houses already exist, you know). I should have specified that I have a problem with wage slavery in order to pay some landlord in order to live somewhere. That's completely different than investing resources and labour to build a house.
Give people places to live and let the community build housing based on need, rather than profit. Nothing magical about that. I'll specify again: I don't want to abolish doing mental/manual labour, but working for a boss so that they pay you a wage based on the profit they made on your labour: Wage slavery. And the answer isn't simple. Otherwise, we'd be living in this world already.
The people do. I think doing so in consumer councils would be a good idea, but I'm not the arbiter of how to achieve this. Do you think that human needs are unknowable?
Who saidanything about central planning?
Well, who says that I'd want to live in that place that's way too big for me now where everything reminds me of my dead spouse? Maybe I'd like to live with my kids, or they move in and I get a place in an outhouse. I'm sure the community and I'll reach a mutual understanding where they'll understand my needs/wishes and we'll reach some form of solution, beneficial to everybody. Is that so much of a stretch, given that I'm part of a community?
IYou apparently had to unmake that whole discussion, huh? :/
All the best to you, @kameecoding@lemmy.world
I fould that discussion rather interesting. It's a shame you didn't. :/
Yes, I have told myself I wouldn't do online arguments, but this one slipped out, don't care for having it on my profile.
Housing is a human right. We already have gigantic amounts of housing that sits empty, new building projects are not the priority.
The government should be in charge of constructing new housing developments to meet the needs of the community. People can also pool resources together to build those things, in the absence of rent and mortgages people would have substantially higher incomes. Over time this would balance out, but would still be doable in the long term.
No one should be homeless. Even if you are able bodied and refuse to work. The amount of people who are able bodied and refuse to work is microscopic. You have been misled by conservative propaganda to believe that welfare recipients are lazy. Welfare recipients are people who for one reason or another are unable to work. This is almost exclusively people with disabilities.
But yes, I think even if you decide to do literally nothing just cause you dont want to, you should still have shelter. Shelter is a human right; housing is a human right. It is a crime against humanity to deny people housing. And if youre that contrarian, to literally be like har har I wanna make a point about how dumb free housing is so ill do literally nothing, you probably have some problems you should sort through in therapy.
I had a nice long response typed up, but I genuinely do not have the energy to pick through what a thoroughly ridiculous comment this is. You're not actually here to have a meaningful conversation on this subject either, you are only here to propagandize for capitalists. So I'll save myself the time and energy.
Vienna social housing model is what we need. Nearly 60% lives in public housing there.
https://youtu.be/MxuACFQBwxs
Paying half if not more of your monthly salary for a shitty place to live is horse shit
The renter system is fine in my opinion
It's the result of the power imbalance that creates the problems. Specifically that property owners hold all the power and have structured society in such a way that housing is artificially scarce and more difficult to build than it should be, which has led to inflated prices
that's what everyone wants.
that's also why housing is so expensive. people are willing to pay a lot of money to live in high quality housing. you are too.
and people who can't afford the high quality housing have to live in the places with broken/old appliances.
if you want those things, you have to get enough money to be able to afford them.