this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2026
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All landlords are bastards.
ALAB!
Couldn't really rent apartments without having some sort of landlord. And not everyone wants to buy
Some are obviously better landlords than others
I think there's a difference between like a landlord and a property management company.
Property management that fixes stuff, cleans up common areas, and such adds value. They do labor that's useful.
A landlord that just gets money because they legally own the place is not adding value. That's what most people hate.
You can, of course, have horrible people assigned to manage the property.
Sounds like Satyrn to me. Six one way, Hexagon to the peak.
"Property management" is what a landlord does in a functioning housing market (I.e. one where the price of housing is holding steady, so a landlord can't make money just renting while the land value goes up on its own). It's what makes renting preferable to owning in a functional market - you pay extra for convenience and flexibility.
What you're saying is that most landlords don't do their job. Which is correct, and also why everyone hates them.
A good landlord do add value.
They do repairs on time (which can be quite costly), takes care of most HOA stuff (and fees), pay quite a lot of taxes (depending on where you live, of course).
Personally I inherited part of my grandmother home (the other part being owned by my father). When she died, I redid most of the isolation, electrical and paints, costing me 75k, and had to do paint again (10k) after the first tenant (they ruined it, it went from white to dark yellow due to how much they smoked).
We had some water damage, which was caused by the town (they refused to pay for the damages, invoking a impossible to follow law), and another one (caused by the neighbor, which refuses to do the repairs), which is still pending (we reduced the rent due to that).
Add to that the taxes, which basically reduce our "earning" by 40% where I live, 6 years after my grandmother passing I just started to see any income from the property.
So yeah, there are bastards amongs us, but abput as much as in any group of people. That's not homeowning that make the bastard, they'd be bastard, home or not.
Regulate landlords!
Absolutely!
Meh, just regurgitate them to heavin' and don't call 'em back. Shrug Whatever.
Housing is a human right and should be free.
Ban landlording and put a high fucking tax on vacant homes. I'm talking 100,000 a year. Watch the price crash. People with mortgages will complain because they now have negative equity. I don't care. Housing is a human right.
Can't afford the fine? Don't worry, your debt is forgiven if you give the government your house. Boom. Everyone with a little money gets to own a house, everyone else gets a government house.
Put a 5 year timer on the law so people know it's coming.
Would be nice but I doubt it's going to happen
In your plan, no new housing on spec to sell would be built. Great solution.
That's because housing is only ever built so it can be sold to landlords to charge rent.
And the problem with that theory is, it's wrong.
First, plenty of luxury housing is built to sell to rich people. The rich people move into the luxury housing, and sell their posh housing to well-to-do workers. They move into the posh housing and sell their nice housing to working professionals. Who sell their run-down housing to poor workers. Who will, under this system, either sell their crap housing to the destitute or just give it to the government to avoid the new taxes.
And second, housing is the government's job to provide. Private capital should not be responsible for building the housing. Housing is a human right, so the govenment should be building it. We shouldn't trust markets to distribute resources people need to live. Markets are okay for, like, video games and shit... but we shouldn't trust markets with human rights.
I agree for the human right, but who will pay for the house repairs? With what money ?
The residents will take the money they would have spent paying rent, and spend it on repairs instead.
Think about it. If repairs cost more than rent, nobody would want to be a landlord! Landlords exist because repairs are cheaper than rent.
In an ideal world, it would work, if the tenant has enough money ahead to do said repairs. If not, what will you do ? Ask the owner? He doesn't have any money anymore, other than his own salary, which may also not be enough to pay for said repairs.
Rent isn't just money lost, it is money that can be put asside in order to be used in the future to do those repairs.
How much money will be kept for that purpose depends on the landlord, which can be either a greedy cunt, a good guy, or anything in between), but that's another topic.
Another use for rent money is to build new homes. Building new things costs money, be it for the material used or the workers involved, and you can't just ask them to work for free.
So you're saying instead of saving our own money, we should trust a landlord to save our money for us, while skimming off the top?
That's the worst trade deal in the history of trade deals. Maybe ever!
In an ideal world, everyone would be kind enough to do the repairs in time. And give back the house in the same (if not better) shape than it was when you started renting it. But we are not in such world, and people, tenants as well as landlords, will think first about their own benefits before those of others they may never know.
I'd be happy to not ask a rent if my tenant would repair and improve the house with their own money. But who would want to upgrade or repair with his hard earned money a house they may move from some years later?
That's kinda the main problem. The tenant do not have much insentive to maintain the house in good shape, other than for it to be good enough to live in. Once they want to move, they will just expect any repairs or improvement to be done by the next tenant.
But if the house is in bad shape (it happened to me after my first tenant who basically wrecked my grandma old house), no tenant would want to live there knowing they will have to pay a lot of money upfront to get an acceptable place to live into.
That why it is logical for the owner/landlord to be the one to take care of all that.
They are the ones who have the most insentives at keeping the place in good shape and improve it.
And to do that, they need to earn enough money, which cannot be done alone by working himself, thus what tenant pays: a participation for future repairs and improvements, in the form of a rent.
Now you'll always find greedy cunts amongs landlords, that considers the rent as their own pocket money. There are way to limit that kind of behaviour (rent limits, among others).
Add I didn't even talk about how to actually build houses. Where would you find that money? The tenant obviously doesn't have enough money, and so will the landowner without rent.
There's no particular reason to assume rent money specifically is what will pay for new homes. Literally any (investment) money can be invested into new homes.
Nor is it any reason to assume it will not.
That's a fundamental part of capitalism, that the one that owns the capital also get to choose where to invest it. It is their money.
Now you can get some that will invest in project that benefits the communitiy, like building new homes, schools. You can also get greedy asholes that only invest for their own benefits, buy new jets, etc.
Now calling all landlords greedy pigs like some does in this topic will only benefits the later, by discouraging those who works toward nobler goals to advertise them, which doesn't help those initiatives to reach their target audience.
Like I told on other replies, I do own a house, which I rent to an elderly couple, so I'm on the landlord "side". It was my grandma house, which I inherited when she died. I renovated it, rented it, had to do costly repair after the first tenant because he trashed the place, all that at a rather low rent for the area. To this day I didn't touch a cent from the rent other than for repairs, and reduced the rent again due to water damages in a room (coming from the neighbor which refuses to do the repairs as it do not affects him).
So, tell me, AITA?
The people who own their own homes after the landlords sell. Fixing a leak in the roof doesn't need to be profitable if you're the one stepping in the puddle all the time.
I didn't stutter, fuck land lords.
What about people who don't want to buy homes?
We figured out alternative solutions to private transportation ownership in many parts of the world.
What sort of solutions from that would fit the case of housing?
Publicly funded and managed housing for those that need it instead of privately funded and managed (landlords). Also, even though it wasnt what I was alluding to, tenant unions.
Alternative idea if you want a more capitalist solution than government owned and distributed housing would be mandated rent to own. End of year, current owner tallies up all expenses, anything over is used to purchase equity at market rate. You either sell the equity when you move, or eventually own the place. No landlords just a delayed title transfer.
Of course this wouldn't solve the fact that housing is a human right that all should have access to but any capitalist solution requires a "loser" to suffer some form of horror
Most people would much rather buy, but they can't because landlords own all the property, driving up the rates. Consolidation of property is getting to be a real problem and even the most demented of free marketeers can recognize that real estate is a scare market that is easily cornered by oligopolies.
You don't need a landlord in order to rent 🤦🤦🤦
How would you rent without a landlord?
Renters coop for instance. The state or city is could be another example
What is renters coop? Also, renting from the government sounds worse than renting from a landlord unless you're getting a steep discount.
A renters cooperative. The renters own all the buildings, the rent strictly goes towards the maintenance and admin costs. Also called "Baugenossenschaft" in Germany if you want to know about real-life examples. Their remnants of pre-ww1 marxist policies. The deposit becomes kind of a buy-in that appreciates in value and when leaving the coop the renter gets their buy-in back. It is usually considered a pretty good investment.
As for renting from the government, this is typically pretty cheap. The soviets for example paid around 5-7% of their income for rent.
from https://doi.org/10.2307/3001359 p178
Relative Weight of Rent in Budgets of Workers and Employees in the USSR.
What's more having the rent set by the government allows for rent decreases for certain groups of people based on their legal status e. g. (same paper p176-177)
I don't understand the difference between a renters coop and a regular apartment.
Fair enough. For five percent, I'll haggle with all the bureaucracy necessary.
A regular apartment the owner gets the rent and then decides how to spend it (maybe on the apartment, maybe the mortgage of the building, maybe on a new sports car for themselves). In a renters coop the tenants pay "themselves" and they decide how to use the money. How much should they allocate for gardening, repairpeople, new buildings etc. It gets cheaper and cheaper at scale too. There usually is some democratic decision making-process involved where the tenants decide.
Who owns the units?
The tenants through whatever governing body that they chose. In lieu of a deposit there is a buy-in that gets you a membership in that body. This buy-in gets returned with an appreciated value if the tenant choses to move somewhere outside the renters coop.
How is that different from buying an apartment?
Because you don't have to buy an apartment. You don't have to pay anything close to the full value of the apartment up front to live in it. You pay something akin to a deposit, and you are sure to get it back with appreciated value if you move out. You don't have the hassle of buying and then selling associated with it. If you leave the co-op you get the portion of the co-op you own paid out and that's it.
The important distinction is that the apartments are paid for by the rent other tenants have paid, that accumulated and is then used for construction. That means the buy-in of a new member is not tied to the market value of the apartment at all, but rather what the co-op values it membership at.
The co-op has an incentive to increase the membership fees because doing so increases the value of all memberships. So if someone decides to leave the co-op they get more than what they paid in, making it a pretty good investment. Theoretically it's capped at demand for memberships, but afaik this has never been an issue.
Furthermore the co-op can offer these apartments however they wish, they aren't bound to a profit motive. They have the option to be more lenient or offer financial assistant to those who can't afford the buy-in. And growing the co-op is usually desirable because it makes a lot of services cheaper like not having to contract out gardening work but employing the gardeners itself.
I hope that makes sense, my family needs me.
So how is that different from a no cost EMI? Also, off topic but your last sentence hilariously sounds like you're a mine worker.
Lol yeah, I hadn't proofread my comment to my satisfaction when my kids started crying and I desperately wanted to at least read it once in full length but my wifes glares kept getting stronger and stronger so I just bailed lol
On EMI, it is a very different thing indeed. At the end of an EMI you own the home personally. With a renters co-op all the renters own and manage all the properties collectively as soon as they become members. Well kind of. A renters co-op might get very large, at which point an elected governing body becomes necessary. Any renter is eligible to vote in these elections, no matter how long they've been renting, and representatives are literally from the neighborhood so it's possible to just talk to them while out walking the dog or whatever. This governing body (however incorporated, usually as an association i think) owns all the properties, some engaged renters put themselves up for election and people vote on it. This governing body then oversees the budget and weighs what to put all the incoming rent toward.
But no matter how long you have lived there, how much rent you paid, you personally don't own any part of any property. If you move to another residence within the co-op you just move there. No selling or buying, your rent might get adjusted but that's it. If you move out of the co-op you get the portion of the co-op that you own paid out. You can think of it a bit like a share in a company. You own a portion of the company, the share is valued at whatever fraction you own times the value of the company. You can decide on the direction of the company by voting with other shareholders. The parallels end however when you get to trading shares, you can't trade membership in a co-op. Every renter is expected to own a "share" (with maybe some rare exceptions) and every "shareholder" is expected to have a residence in the co-op. It's therefore not possible to trade your share. Either you're a renter in which case you have to have one, or you aren't in which case you cannot have one. Meaning you can't speculate on them.
Who would you be renting from?
Renters coop for instance. The state or city is could be another example
Coop, state or city would be the landlord (the entity owning the place) in those cases
Not all, I rent an appartment in different place that I like while mine is rented. No extra profit. Just do not want to go through all selling and buying extra work
Sounds like something a bastard would say