Asklemmy

Landlords aren't inherently evil - it's a useful job... a good landlord will make sure that units are well maintained and appliances are functional. A good landlord is also a property manager.

Landlords get a bad name because passive income is a bullshit lie. If you're earning "passive income" you're stealing someone else's income - there's no such thing as money for nothing, if you're getting money and doing nothing it's because someone else isn't being properly paid for their work.

If you own housing that you rent out more than you use it yourself, you're a landlord.

If you rent out your house or apartment while you're on vacation, I wouldn't call you a landlord. But if you have a house or apartment that you only ever offer on AirBNB without ever using it yourself, you're a landlord.

Btw, I don't agree that being a landlord makes you deserving of a guillotine, but I do agree that we should limit the ownership of housing to natural persons, with a limit on how much space a person can own.

If you are engaging with housing as an investment vehicle, you are part of the reason why there is a global housing crisis.

Housing is a human right and should be legislated as such.

If you are owning houses just to use them as AIRBNBs, yes. Profiting off of artificial scarcity and already having money is bad. Being wealthy doesn't mean you deserve to be more wealthy.

A landlord is a landlord, regardless of the particular lease terms. In general, they aren't automatically good or bad. They're just people acting as rationally as anyone else with respect to their material conditions and interests.

If you're asking why they get a bad reputation, I think that's also pretty straight forward:

• Almost everyone has had or knows someone who's had to deal with an especially neglectful or difficult landlord;
• landlords have been engaging in notoriously greedy and abusive behavior since the industrial revolution;
• landlords aren't doing themselves any favors they way some of them publicly brag and whine about being landlords;
• and there's just something that isn't right about owning someone else's home and probably everyone has some faint sense of that.

Personally, I don't think that landlords should be guillotined, but housing policy that's accommodating to them is bad policy. We should be strengthening tenant protections and building new housing to the point that private landlords become practically obsolete.

Do you own a residential home for a purpose other than you or your family living in it? You're a landlord.

AirBnB is horrible for local housing prices, because it removes long-term housing from the supply in exchange for more expensive short-term rentals. Guillotines are too nice for AirBnB owners; They should be thrown feet-first into a wood chipper.

It's a really easy definition for me. Do you acquire recurring income from a residential location that you don't personally live at? You get the French haircut.

Owning a home and having roommates that share the mortgage is fine. Putting your guest bedroom on Airbnb is fine. Owning an apartment building and living in one of the units and actually providing labor to contribute to the running of the apartment building (whether through maintenance or office work), perfectly ok.

With that being said, when it comes time for the guillotine, we'll start with the corporate landlords to give the "mom and pop" landlords time to come to their senses.

Edit: explaining my reasoning: Passive income is theft. Owning things is not a job. Humans have a right to live by nature of being alive, profiting off of a human right is evil.

My landlord is actually a community nonprofit group that owns several units in our neighborhood. They do rent for the most part based on income. I forget the exact breakdowns but iirc it's capped on the upper end at an actually reasonable percentage of your income so you're not paying most of your paycheck to rent. Then my wife and I are on the low end because we're on a fixed income. Before we got approved for section 8 we paid their lowest flat rate which is basically just enough to cover property taxes and maintenance which iirc percentage wise was a higher percentage of our income than their normal rate is but it still wasn't crazy for us.

Then they use the excess to do things like update the units to make them more energy efficient, community organizing, etc. They've also bought out a couple of abandoned houses in the area and redeveloped them so people can actually live in them.

I personally don't have a problem with landlords per se. Not everybody wants to own a home and deal with all of the maintenance and things that go along with it. I don't even necessarily have a problem with them getting paid to deal those things. What I personally have a problem with is housing being used as ~~passive income~~a free money cheat.

Is your Airbnb a spare part of your primary home, or a money making scheme that exploits housing somebody else could live in?

A landlord is anyone that owns a property, and rents it out, whether it's commercial or residential, short-term, long-term, or even leasing land to hunters.

Landlords aren't a problem per se. Think, for instance, of student housing. When I moved to go to school, I needed a place to stay, but I didn't intend to live there for a long period of time. It would have been entirely unreasonable to buy a house or condo in order to go to school. I couldn't stay at home, because my parents lived a long way away from any university. (Dorms are utter hell, as are co-ops. I've only ever had one roommate that wasn't a complete and utter bastard.) You have a number of people who have the expectation in their career that they're going to be moving from city to city frequently, or will need to be working on-site for a period of months; it's not reasonable to expect them to buy either.

Then there are businesses. Most businesses don't want to buy, and can't afford to do so. Commercial real estate is it's own mess.

Taxing landlords won't solve the problem; landlords simply raise rents to achieve the same income. Preventing landlords from incorporating--so that they're personally liable for everything--might help. But it would also limit the ability to build new housing, since corporations have more access to capital than individuals. (Which makes sense; a bank that would loan me $5M to build a small housing complex would be likely to lose $5M.) Limiting ownership--so a person could only own or have an interest in X number of properties--might help, but would be challenging for Management companies are def. part of the problem in many cases, but are also a solution to handing maintenance issues that a single person might not be able to reasonably resolve.

Government ownership of property is nice in theory, but I've seen just how badly gov't mismanaged public housing in Chicago. It was horrific. There's very little way to directly hold a gov't accountable, short of armed revolution.

I don't think that it's the simple problem that classical Marxists insist it is. It's a problem for sure. I just don't think that there's an easy solution that doesn't cause a lot of unintended problems.

If you are making money on a place where someone lives then it all counts.

Airbnb is worse than traditional landlords because they remove supply for people to live (excluding shared spaces).

Someone who hords houses.

If you have an beach house that you uses every year, and rents it when it's not using or you have one second house that you got from a deceased family member... If you need to work to maintain this second house...

That's fine. It will not cause a inflation on the house market, it's not just an investment.

In my city (not in US), there are a booming market of very small apartments that rich people buy just to protect their money from inflation. As result, higher prices, less units available for the general public, and the new units that are available are terrible.

Billionaires have a completely different level of capital as the doctors, lawyers, engineers, and business owners who have $1-5 million in assets. I’m not going to fault somebody for being successful and using their money to buy capital to make more money. Billionaires are the only ones who should be named, shamed, and blamed. It’s an entirely different level of greed and exploitation, because it’s totally needless. It’s like you already won capitalism, but that’s not enough, no, you have to rig it so that nobody else ever wins like you did. Those people are so rich they can employ bot farms to throw fuel on the social media fires that keep us all hating each other instead of them. It’s pretty simple. Don’t trust anybody with a private jet.

Landlords are landlords. Rather than simply guillotine landlords forever, it's better to have publicly owned housing. It's not really a gray area, the system itself is fucked and should be abolished, but exists precisely because publicly owned housing isn't widespread yet.

AirBnB landlords are even worse than traditional landlords (although there's a lot of crossover between the two) because the overly high rates they charge for short-term leases are increasing the prices of long-term leases as well.

The bottom line. We devised a system (note, it’s not some natural system, people made this) that allows a finite resource to be claimed indefinitely.

A developer comes and builds an apt complex, then collects rent on it FOREVER. The initial value they added to housing flexibility and additional housing expires, but the value they extract does not.

As available land disappears over time (which all finite resources do when being consumed), wealth inevitably coalesces to the owners. It seems fair at first, but it ignores what makes an economy work. It allows people to not work and extract value from others over time. It is not sustainable.

You can own an entire forest just so you can enjoy a stroll by yourself, while an entire group of people are left on the outside owning nothing. If you can’t use your land and block access, you’re hurting society more than helping.

It’s somewhat like an insidious monopoly growing slowly. Rent to own as an option is a much better system.

There's way too much money in the hands of the wealthy. What are they going to do with it all? Invest in the stock market. All the good investments are overvalued. All the bad investments are have been saturated too. What else can they do with all of that money. They gotta put it somewhere.

So they put excess money into real estate. So the price of real estate has been driven up so much that it's over valued like any other avenue of investment.

The stock prices being overvalued isn't good but isn't something that'll affect regular people. But their real estate investments being over valued? Well that real estate isn't an investment to someone that simply needs a place to live.

And that's the problem, the price of housing is priced above what the people what people outside of the investor class can afford. And the investor class wants a return on their investment in the overprices real estate (that they collectively drove the price up on) so charge a lot for rent. Of course maybe if people moved to another area that would put downward pressure on the rent prices. But AirBnB is there so if this happens they can still get income from that when no one can afford the insanely high rent.

So the overarching problem is the wealthy have wayyy too much money and are dumping their excess wealth into real estate and pricing people that just need a place to live out of the market. AirBnB isn't the cause of the problem but it makes the problem worse.

One of many problems caused by the unwillingness to simply tax the wealthy.

I absolutely despise airbnb owners, they drive housing and renting houses to the clouds in whichever areas they operate. Extra guillotine for you.

This doesn't seem like an open question to me.

Worst fucking strawman I've seen.

The answer to this question is hugely region dependent, so you’ll probably get vastly different answers that are all still valid.

Where I’m from, we’re in a housing crisis. There aren’t enough homes for everyone, property prices have ballooned well beyond reasonable year over year, to the point that anyone under 40 will not be able to buy their own home in their lifetime unless they have rich parents or work very very high paying jobs.

In this climate, someone buying a house so they can charge an insanely high rent (because rents and property values are closely linked) is… I’m not sure what the word is, but they’re clearly more driven by personal gain than any sort of common good.

Airbnb is the same issue when you have such limited housing supply. Someone else isn’t in a house because that house is off the market for people to live. There’s a reason why Airbnb is tightly restricted and banned in many cities.

Now while your stereotype landlord might be a lazy, parasitic ghoul, the fact of the matter is people need to rent just as much as they need to own. If someone owns another piece of property and they rent it out and maintain it, it’s kind of difficult to complain too much about it.

I know people who have had fantastic landlords that kept up the properties, did proactive upgrades, and seldom raised rents. I also know people whose landlords broke the law many times by refusing to deal with maintenance problems on a timely basis, increased rent by the maximum legally allowed amount every year, and were quick to evict the tenants because “family was moving into the home” (they didn’t). You get a great mix of shitheads and good people in any market.

The people arguing at either far end of the spectrum can easily be ignored. At best they have an axe to grind and use every opportunity to engage in hyperbole to support their naive position. At worst they’re trying to manipulate public opinion for their own purposes. At any rate, the more extreme and absolute an opinion you read online, the more easily you should be willing to reject and ignore it.

Ok, but all that nuance aside, if someone comes up to me and asks “Landlords. Guillotine or no?” then I’m going to say “guillotine!” because there wasn’t any room left for a conversation.

Airbnb isn't ethical and definitely a landlord but worse than long-term rental landlords, unless it's also your home (so not all the time) or a guest house. Banning short term rentals lowers rent and decreases homelessness.

When AirBNB first arrived, I think we thought it would be a tool to let people rent a spare room in their house short term to travelers, with a built in system for reviews and reputation building to ensure that it's safe for both parties.

Turns out it's a platform that enables wannabe real estate moguls to buy up housing and convert it into unlicensed hotels for a tidy profit.

Official communist stance: Corporate landlords who spend all their resources into buying more houses to price everyone out of the market. Renting out a single room out of your family house is immoral, but doesn't hold a candle to the absolute evil of corporate landlords.

Remember: Communists don't give a shit about individuals; that's liberalism. They care about systems and dismantling them. It's those who throw themselves in front of those systems to defend them who end up becoming causalities. There are plenty of examples in socialist history where the most evil of abusers would willingly give up their power (out of cowardice) and would ultimately go on to live a normal life. Perfect example of this was the literal king of China who the figurehead of the system oppressing them. When the communists won they gave up their power and their response was pretty much "You had no way of knowing what you were doing was wrong, we're going to teach you why it was wrong" and even though it was a LOT of work, they did eventually get the picture and integrated into post-monarchy society.

TL;DR don't die on the hill and you won't die on the hill

Deserving of the guillotine? What? This question doesn't feel sincere, and I wonder whether you're really going to be trying to understand other people's reasoning. I'll bite though. We have enough homes for everyone to have their own home, but a very large number of people rent or are homeless. Big corporations buy up all the property and convert it to rentals so even those who can afford to buy property have a very hard time finding anything, and what's available has jacked up prices. We're talking people like blackrock. THOSE people can burn in hell, those people are taking advantage of every single person who rents from them. It's a scale, you know. Blackrock is evil - my grandpa who rents out his old house is not, even if I disagree with the fact that he's renting at all. Charging someone enough to pay the mortgage and give you a paycheck is well... I mean it's demanding more money than what the property is worth from someone. They'd be better off without you there as a middle-man. At best you're taking advantage of a small number of people, at worst you're literally blackrock. There's no reason a single person should not have their own home, because we already have enough homes to go around.

It applies to anyone who has a property they only use to generate income via rent

Hotels are a gray area as they provide some amount of service