Facts that concern me:
- they are on Twitter
- they use a combined username (gross)
- they list vacations as number one
Same people will be looking for a govt bailout when the real estate market collapses.
I remember looking up just the air b&b’s in the Portland metro and there were over 4,000……
A large majority of the rest were being rented.
The wealthy are buying it all with no regulation.
There should be one home per family in the suburbs. One vacation place and your house. No one needs 10 properties, get rich another way you greedy terrible fucks.
Rich people outbid regular folks for real resources (homes), taking away any chance at intergenerational wealth building. the only (legal) answer at the moment is taxation of the rich.
Gary Stevenson has some worthwhile insights on what we can do and how to convince working class people that the rich must be stopped or else your kids and grandkids will all be homeless renters.
inequality is sharply risinh all around the world. and it’s getting worse. this is arguably the most important issue of our time.
the only (legal) answer at the moment is taxation of the rich.
I used to have my own place before my wife and I got married, and she had her own house too. When I moved in with her I decided to rent out my place to a friend, otherwise I’d have to still pay like $650 a month for my mortgage. I set my friends rent at $900 a month for him and a friend, with cats. I paid my mortgage and had some extra to save up in case a repair was needed. Average rent for an apartment (not a house) was 1200-1500 in the same area. My renters ended up taking better care of the house than I ever did. It was beautiful when they lived there. I ended up making about 5k to 10k extra bucks over the course of a few years and my mortgage was paid for me. Eventually they had to move out due to some issues between the two at which point I sold the house and made over six figures(net profit, not gross), off a house that cost less than $80,000 when I bought it.
See what I did there? I charged a reasonable rent and still made a totally stupid amount of money off of just one property. I wasn’t a goddamn parasite who tried to bleed my tenants for everything they were worth.
People like these total shitbags. They’re the reason why America’s youth have no future
Using my “friends” to pay off a personal debt while making $250/mo in profit off them. See, it’s possible to be a good landlord, everyone!
Did you share any of what you made from the sale with your “friends” who helped you pay for it and kept it in good condition for you?
Did those friends run the risk of having to pay for a new roof or anything else that can go wrong with a house? Tell me you’ve never owned a house without telling me you’ve never owned a house
You still take someone elses money, just less of it.
See, when the Landlord charges reasonable rates, and actually provides services in exchange for that rent (helping update appliances to newer, having paperwork on hand for any code/inspections needed for property changes (that the landlord would ultimately benefit from,) and in general treating it as a matter of ‘I have obligations’ instead of ‘I will do nothing but I will absolutely blame the tennants for the inevetable crumbling of the property.’
I dislike the concept at base level, but that is a someone who is trying to not be a scumbag.
Someone who needs a place to live in and doesn’t have the money or doesn’t want to buy their own place. IMO, it is a fair trade as long as the landlord isn’t a cunt. The reasons to why they don’t have enough to buy their own place have nothing to do with a single landlord, some people don’t want to take roots in a single place. If you wanna go to war with someone, go to war with companies, ban companies on owning and renting places, not people.
The incentive structure for landlords creates these conditions, it’s not some individual failing of their moral character. Individual tyrants aren’t better than corporate tyrants.
I had to rant in a couple of comments because I drives me crazy when people defend leeching.
On a more constructive note: Housing cooperatives. I think they should be more widespread. Some people come together to build a house and then live in it for the cost it takes to actually support it. No crazy big apartments with a reasonable amount of people (roughly one bedroom per person), shared luxury such as gardens, in house shops, hell even a pool if you want. There is no leeching, just collective ownership.
What if some people do not fit into some pre-made construction of how some dictator imagines a “nice living situation”? Every person is an individual with individual needs. Presuming, that a single bedroom is big or small enough for every single person is absolutely undermining the fact of how diverse people actually are, as are their visions of their own lives.
Cooperatives are democratic, the members vote on what it means to have a nice living situation.
If there are ten people with ten different expectations, they would all vote for something, in summary/conclusion, “in the middle”, which would make nobody happy. The best would be, if everyone could choose for themselves and that is the case right now, except many people perhaps cannot afford, what they’d wish for. Still, better than having a “democracy”, where nobody is truly happy.
The case right now is, if you can’t afford what you want, you can’t choose it. They don’t get to choose for themselves, the market chooses for them!
If I have to choose between market decision making and democratic decision making, I’ll choose democracy. At the very least, a democratic process leaves no one homeless.
If it would destroy the economy if everyone did it, then it should not be doable in the first place.
It’s funny that one probably-landlord downvoted this. You know who you are, scum-sucking leech.
It’s kind of a false dilemma to say everyone should do it or nobody should do it. There are a lot of things that would destroy the economy or even the world if everyone did it. I think there is a healthy amount of small family owned rental properties like the one in the meme.