this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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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.
That's true. Let's fix that.
And still: Do you pay 30 to 50% of your income in your own home for that?
How to 'fix' that? Someone has to do the work to build and maintain housing? Should they do it for free?
You could get rid of housing being a means for landlords to profit from and hold housing in a usufruct property relation, and/or in common. Building and maintaining housing can be managed by the community (or be payed for by the community).
Who pays the upfront costs? Big taxes?
In a capitalist system, the government could print the money to give out a loan and destroy that money once the loan gets payed back to soften inflation.
But ideally, building housing shouldn't be done for profit, either. But I guess that would require capitalism to be abolished. Which would be - again - ideal.
Who takes out this loan? The person who wants to live in the home? What if they can't afford to pay it back? Isn't paying interest on the loan the same as paying rent, except now you're stuck without being able to move, and no one else is there to fix your roof when it needs it?
Yup. Or coops.
What if someone can't afford rent? I'd rather see the government eat the risk than see people go homeless.
No, because if you pay rent, your rent becomes someone else's capital. If you pay off the debt, you invest in your own property.
Who says you can't transfer the home to someone who buys in? That's an advantage of coops.
Landlords usually don't do that. They hire handymen to do this, so why can't that be done by the person who lives there?
If a co-op takes the loan, aren't they just becoming a landlord? And who does the work to organize it - are they paid? Isn't that just like a landlord taking profit?
If you look at the government as just a collective of the people, then there's no magical entity 'eating the risk' - it just means the people get screwed over and/or someone doesn't get paid for their work.
Yes, you can use a handyman to fix your roof, but you have to pay them. And if you can't afford to, you what - take more loan from the government which endlessly prints money?
No, because the people living in these places own a share in the coop. It's distributing the load of repaying the loan on several shoulders and once it's payed off, the rent becomes basically only the upkeep (rather than a source of income for the owners... because the owners are the ones who pay the "rent").
Depends on how the coop manages it. But they could theoretically use part of the rent as payment for someone who manages the co-op.
No, cause that's not profit. That's part of upkeep. Do you know what "profit" is (i.e the difference between profit and income)?
I don't agree with that abstraction, but ok.
What are you talking about? Institutions aren't "magic". Risk of loss gets easier to manage if more people chip in. That's the whole reason why insurances exist. And why diversifying a financial portfolio is the best strategy for banks. Yes, some will not be able to pay back their loans. But you can buffer that with interest by the ones that do pay them back.
And your alternative is that these people who can't afford a handyman (or fix the roof themselves) can afford rent? Do you think paying rent every month is cheaper than hiring handymen? And evensif it were like that: how would the landlord afford the handyman? Why would they rent out their property, if rent was lower than the cost of upkeep? Your scenario doesn't add up.
Do you know the difference between profit and income for a personal landlord? Effectively not much. It's not just an investment for them, it's a good chunk of their job and their income. Often they are paying the mortgage with income from another job too.
They can rent their property at a rent lower than upkeep because they are gaining capital that they can eventually sell.
Larger landlords can even do better due to the economy of scale for upkeep costs.
Unfortunately, landlords will often try to make the most and so maximize rent based on the market. The market should balance this out (ie if being a landlord is so lucrative, more people should become landlords and that would increase the competition and costs would go down). But many people don't want to figure out all the details, borrow large sums of money, take on the risk, take on the stress of managing tenants, etc. - which just shows the value added by the landlord is real. Of course without enough regulations, things can go wonky - like our current system with large corporate landlords. I'm not saying that's good. Just that the basic landlord concept isn't inherently flawed.
I was asking about the qualitatve difference, not the quantitative.
Citation needed. Im guessing that the minimum is more than a few hundred Euros a month net profit per rented out unit. That's nothing to sneeze at for one household. Especially considering how low effort one unit is (can't be more than a few hours a month).
For private landlords: Definetly not. The needed labour for owning a unit is negligible in comparison to a full-time job.
This might be an ideal but it contradicts with your statement below. And even if: At some point someone wants to make profit off the property. Your "argument" only kicks the bucket down the road until some buyer (and I wonder who can buy inflated house prices) will increase the rent for profit.
Rent-seeking is the most popular form of gaining income, since it requires no work (except for upkeep) and has virtually no risk, compared to a market.
Those larger landlords want even more return of investment. Don't tell me you're so naive to think that no one wants to actually make money of the people with the least power in this dynamic: the tenants.
Aha! So now, we're leaving this ideal world of yours. Why do you think that's actually an anomaly of the system?
You ignore that the housing market is very inflexible. People always need housing, so there is a natural demand, along with incredibly prohibitive costs of entry. People can't afford any homes (that's the housing crisis), because property values are through the roof, driving up rents! You act as if people are too "lazy" to become landlords, but most can't even afford their own homes!
dude, people like this don't think those things exist, because they have never had to pay for them.
they also don't understand what a payroll tax is. because if they don't pay it, it must not exist.