No Stupid Questions

Lots of good answers here, so here’s a fact that might help you understand why people have these positions:

Based on currently available numbers, there are about 31 vacant housing units for every homeless person in the U.S.

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.

Let’s say the city proposes a bill to build public housing apartments next to your aunt’s houses. This will guarantee reducing the rent and potential tenants your aunt collects. Now, because your aunt took so much loan from the bank and can’t pay it back, they will have to foreclose on the houses. Do they vote against the bill? You bet your ass they will.

You asking wether people making blanket statements have any nuance in their views?

In the most cases I'd say no.

I can see the evil in what these large corporations are doing but I have rented in the past when I was neither prepared for the burden of home ownership nor planning to stay in that location for a long time. If I couldn't have rented what would I have done? I would have been essentially FORCED into owning a home or what, living in the streets? And what if you wish to move but no one wants to buy your house? More you are forced to stay out turn evil by buying two houses.

It's ok to love your aunt. She didn't make the rules she's just living by them. If there's a problem with the system, start at the top.

In an ideal world maybe renting homes would be something that isn't parasitic. But the world isn't ideal, and you end up with housing as investment, which means housing shortages, housing inflation, and housing restrictions.

Yeah, the big landlords are worse, but even the small ones are almost always going to be sucking the blood of their tenants beside because it's a losing proposition from the get-go. Think about it for a second. If your relatives bought those houses as an investment, no matter how nice they are about it, no matter how "fair" their rents, they're part of a bad and broken system, they're profiting off of other people's need for a basic, fundamental thing that can't be escaped.

It isn't like someone that has a big house and rents out a room, which is still kinda parasitic on the far left scale of things because it means they don't need that house in the first place, but let's be fucking real and admit that nobody should be forced to move just because their kids left for college or whatever, and now there's a spare room. The further left you go, the crazier that kind of asinine thing gets, but extremes are gonna extreme, ya dig?

But once you're consolidating property for the sole purpose of charging other people to live there? Yeah, landlords, no matter how nice they may be, are fucking over everyone.

It's like ACAB. Yeah, we all know that some individual police officers are probably not actively fucking people over and such, but they're part of the system, and if they aren't actively working against that system, they're part of the problem too.

Your relatives probably are decent folks that are just trying to get ahead in a capitalist world where that kind of investment is stable and effective. And I can't hate, nor abide hate towards, people that are really just doing the best they can. But they're still parasitic. A medical leech is no less a parasite because it happens to pull a clot out. A mosquito is no less a parasite because it's just trying to make babies. The comparison isn't exactly 1:1 there, but you get me, right?

I don't waste my hate on people like your relatives, I save it for predatory companies until and unless the small fry are assholes alongside being parasites.

But you can't genuinely believe in the more common "left"ideologies without recognizing the flaws of capitalism. When you look at those flaws, you begin to realize that it really doesn't matter what scale things start at, it always gets worse.

Along those lines, let's say your relatives are fucking saints. They do everything right by their tenants, only making enough profit to ensure their older days are safe.

Then they die, as we all will.

Someone inherits those houses. Again, even if they're saints, they didn't do a damn thing to build those homes, they took no risks, did none of the work. So, even if they sell them and abandon being a landlord, they're profiting off of all those years of rent payed in. And if they don't? Do they just run those few places as a landlord? Just continuing to profit off of others, they aren't worse than what came before, but they aren't better

But, at some point, you've got these homes owned by some great-great-great-whatever, and why? At what point is that not parasitic, even when everyone along the line does nothing other than be landlords? And what happens when you run into someone inheriting that isn't a saint. They either expand the empire, or go slum lord, or start abrogating their responsibilities. And you end up with the same kind of situation as the worst landlords.

I'm not saying there aren't benefits to renting as a renter, there are. But when the housing is an investment, rinse benefits start disappearing fast because that's how it works. At some point, to realize that investment, either rent goes up, or the place gets sold at a profit, which sends rent up. Housing as investment is inherently parasitic, no matter how good the parasites are to their host

Renting allows those without the needed capital to access a resource.

Backing out from that, one should question why shelter is a resource that someone cannot access on a minimum wage salary.

So, fundamentally, landlording isn't inherently evil, but it's presentation in the system is inherently corrupting. As in, at any moment that someone retains an excess of shelter they do not need, and instead rent it out, they are constraining the market for their own gain, at the detriment of others who in need shelter.

Next consider degrees of influence: large corporations buy up tons of units and exert inordinate power on the system. They systemically unbalance the purchasing ability of normal folk, due to process or sheer wealth. Fine, that's the high water of corruption. From there it's only shades of difference down to the mom and pop landlord. It's up to you to decide where they land on the scale.

I actually have a related question that I'm curious to hear takes on. I'm a leftist, and I own a 1-bed apartment where two good friends of mine rent the apartment right next door. Their landlord is planning to sell next year, and they don't have the ability to buy it. So depending on who does buy the place, my friends could be out of a home. My sister and I could combine finances to buy their unit (with a mortgage), and ensure that my friends could stay where they are. This would be a bit of a financial burden but doable, and we would need to charge rent to pay back the mortgage.

Would this be a net good or a net evil? I feel very conflicted about potentially being a landlord (especially for friends) but also don't want them to need to move.

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 have no problem with landlords.

Those who own apartments are also taking some big risks I’m not comfortable with. When something requires maintenance, it’s usually something very expensive.

This means that either the landlord has to have like 50 k€ ready for emergencies or be willing to borrow money from a bank and pay back with interest.

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.

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"

We mean all of them. Being a landlord is racketeering other people's hard earned money for the human right of being housed, they're all parasites that grabbed the housing market to a point nobody else can buy anything to actually live in.

Sorry, parasite.

Only way i think it’s acceptable is one house per person, or renting out property you live at.

If your aunts partner has a place, unused, then sure rent it.

If your aunts property has another home on it then sure rent it.

So as always, it depends and there is a spectrum. The scum of the scum are slum lords, i.e. landlords who buy property, do not fix up or maintain it, fill it with any old tenant that is desperate enough to take it, will evict someone at the drop of a hat, and constantly charge exorbitant amounts on property the own outright because the property value went up this year. It doesn't necessarily have to be that bad, but people that buy property simply as an "investment", i.e. get passive income from people with less money than them to buy property, are leeching off the less fortunate. There are certainly scales of badness to that, but that idea is simply immoral.

But there are other situations where one may be a "landlord" and it's not really a moral problem. For example, a cousin of mine had to work overseas for a bit over a year and was put up in a hotel during that time. He didn't want to sell his home, as he would be returning to it later, but also didn't want it to sit empty. He ended up signing a year long lease over to a couple students, charged them little more than the mortgage (enough to cover the mortgage, taxes and any minor repairs that may be needed after they left) and returned home to a house that was still in decent shape, hadn't had any break ins, infestations, or damage from the elements, and the students got some inexpensive housing for the year. No one was taken advantage of and he wasn't just milking poor people for profit. Everyone won. That is clearly different.