Rent is theft
Rent is theft
you're wrong. objectively. you are delusional and making ridiculous statements that are objectively false, both about housing and about MAGA, neither of which have anything to do with each other.
democratic voters have higher incomes than republican voters. most high income people (100K+) vote democratic in the last election the groups that voted republican were working-class incomes between 30-100K.
Rent is theft
They also had an incredibly corrupt and repressive society full of black markets and very few people actually spent that little rent due to all the corruption. and just like in capitalist societies, the poor struggled paid most of their income to basic necessities and the rich paid hardly anything. housing in desirable areas and cities are hardly abundant. You wanted off the waiting lists, you had to bribe someone, often repeatedly. Bribery was illegal, but the person getting bribed would just bribe the officials and law officers.
But I mean, yeah if you wanted to be miner in Siberia and live in a shack housing was cheap. Not so much if you wanted to live Moscow or St Petersberg. That's also true of the USA. Plenty of cheap houses in crappy places nobody wants to live where there is little economic opportunity.
Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains — all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is affected by the labor and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of these improvements does the land monopolist contribute, and yet, by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived…The unearned increment on the land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice done.
Rent is theft
why is it crazy if someone is willing to pay it?
rich people exist and they can easily afford that 6K a month, even if you can't.
Rent is theft
houses aren't free money machines. they are very costly to own. but you are clearly ignorant of the responsibilities of home ownership and the complexities involved.
Rent is theft
Math is hard.
Much easier to just be ignorantly outraged about how anyone who owns a home is an evil leech on society, or something.
it couldn't be that some people are shitheads and would remain shitheads regardless of they own or rent or are landlords. and that most people are just trying to get buy best they can and dealing with a complex housing system and often sometimes their self-interest in in conflict with other people's self interest.
Rent is theft
only 9% of residential housing is owned by corporate entities. corporations are no sizable impact on housing prices in the market at large. 91% of homes are owned by individuals.
housing prices have skyrocketed because residential homeowners and renters, oppose new housing. the USA has systematically build less housing than it needs since the 1990s, meanwhile the population is has grown by about 100 million, while only building new homes for about 1/3 of those people. in 2024 the USA build 1.35 million new homes, willing adding 3.2 million new residents. we are building about 1/3 of the housing we need just to stabilize prices. if you want to lower them, than you'd need to build more houses than there are incoming people.
in my own city, which has highest housing costs in the country, renters groups systematically oppose new housing, and wonder why their rents go up 5-10% a year. we build about 3000 new units of housing a year, meanwhile we have 30K incoming residents a year. if you have about 10x the population coming in every year as you have new housing, rents are going to skyrocket until you build enough housing to meet demand, and rents won't go down until you build enough housing to exceed demand. if rental groups stopped opposing new housing, we'd have more than double the amount of new housing, and rental prices would be less than they are.
people liek you are the problem. because you blame CORPORATIONS MAN. when it's people like you that go to your town/city meetings and demand all new housing projects be stopped or downscaled because you don't 'want anymore people moving here since i already live here'. but when it comes to say, adding jobs to the local economy you are all for it.
my city recent approved a massive development that will bring 20,000 new jobs. this new development is also building 200 new units of housing. it was proposed with 20K jobs, and 2000 new units of housing. but the people who live this city thought that was 'too much' and wanted the 20K jobs but 1/10th of the proposed housing.
the issue is everyday average people including renters. they don't want new homes to be built. so the prices keep going up.
if you want prices to drop or stabilize in your city, then go to city meetings and demand that every any any housing project be built ASAP and as largely as possible.
Rent is theft
most americans want to be rich and are jealous as hell they aren't the rich, and if they got rich, they would be just as greedy and self-interested as they rich they claim to hate so much are.
I've seen pretty much all my 20s anarchist/communist friends become landlords who now argue that taxes and tenants are evil. they felt exploited and now they feel free to exploit... it's almost as if it isn't about fairness and more about bitterness and power.
people tend to become the things they hate.
Rent is theft
sorry, what about your labor makes it more valuable than anyone else who also rents?
Rent is theft
it's about your usage needs.
renting and owning have different costs, more than purely economic. if you own your own hardware... you have to maintain it. if you rent it, you don't.
if an AWS server blade on which I'm hosting blows up, I don't have to go spend $5000 to replace it. if I am running off that server blade from my home.. it can blow up with the bonus risk of possibly burn my house down. also if someone hacks my serve in my basement and stuff CP on it... well that's another big risk that I wouldn't have if I was renting, because if someone hacks my amazon AWS rental space, the cops aren't going to come raid my home. they subpoena amazon.
home owning is no different. it involves much more risk than renting. and being a landlord assumes yet more risk as you take on the risk of your tenants.
but most people dont' understand any of this. they don't even have a basic economics 101 understanding. there is also this thing called insurance, usage agreements, etc, that all have pricing affects and can be used to mitigate risks at increased costs.
I run IT for my company in a hybrid structure. Certain legal requirements and risk factors require us to keep certain services/data on premises, and other services we have moved to the cloud (rental) because it's cheaper and takes less man-hours of maintenance and assumes less risk. 10 years ago were entirely on premises and used zero cloud services, but we also had more downtime and had to shut down operations if we had a power loss or connectivity. Now power loss has a minimal impact and connectivity losses are mere annoyances.
Rent is theft
the majority of landlords aren't corporations. 8.9 perecent of all resdential housing stock is own by corporate entities.
91.1 percent is owned by individual landlords.
the people i've known who rent corporately owned properties are typically well-off. all the corporate owning-housing in my area is largely over market rate and mostly rented out by rich people who can easily afford it.
Rent is theft
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.
Rent is theft
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 and is just some made up thing!
Rent is theft
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.
Rent is theft
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?
Rent is theft
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.
Rent is theft
how do you know you aren't the parasite?
Rent is theft
a lot of tech folks don't have great high paying jobs. only a small subset of them do, most of whom, were already rich before they got those jobs because they came from wealthy families.
i have rented out a room before of my condo. so have several of my friends until they had kids. are we all 'evil' landlords? or are we only evil if we buy units we don't live in? was I evil when I charged 1200/mo for the bedroom, despite the market rent in my area being closer to 1500? or was I supposed to rent it out at $500 a month or something?
or how about when I had a shitty tenant who was late with the rent, damaged my floors/walls, threatened me and my dog, and I kicked them out and kept their deposit because it cost me like $800 to repair all the shit they did? and because of that experience I no longer rent out my spare bedroom, therefore reducing units and driving up rent further in my area, where today a bedroom is now almost 1800/mo?
Rent is theft
thanks for the detailed and explanatory response. love to see more of this commentary on lemmy rather than the 'rent is evil' crap that goes on around here.
it's about as informed and reasonable as 'taxation is theft!' crap. It's just the left-wing warcry equivalent to that.
and all the 'rent is evil' idiots i know in real life... took mommy and daddy's money and became landlords themselves and now they complain about how taxes are evil... it's almost as if people are selfish jerks who just like to complain about obligatory costs...
Rent is theft
rent-seeking is the natural state of the market unless it's regulated as such to disincentivize it.
and by market, I mean people. most people will always seek to extract as much as they can from something while giving as little back as they can.
pretty much. the person you are replying to is entirely delusional and has decided 'money is evil' so therefore they shouldn't ever have to pay anyone for anything.
And yet I wonder if they go into the grocery store and steal food... probably not. it's almost as if they are just rhetorically grandstanding to feel superior to us 'idiots' who think money isn't 'evil' and can don't vastly overgeneralize everyone who we don't identify with in this very moment. I've been a renter, an owner, and a landlord, and I've been poor and I've been middle-class. I have not been wealthy, and I never aspired to be wealthy.
apparently when i was a starving student i was a good person! but the second i got a decent income and was able to live in a nicer place and eventually buy a place, which i could only afford at first by renting out the spare bedroom, i cross over into becoming an evil greedy capitalist villain who is destroying and oppressing my former self, or something.