ALAP

Post Reply New Topic

All Landlords Are Parasites

Slum Lords are for sure.
I was briefly a landlord for a family member’s home while they were in prison.We didn’t get any profit, the money went to pay fines and put $ on their account.When the tenants bothered to pay.They trashed the house, stole and they actually had the money to pay rent and it was reasonable.The house was also a decent solid house.
We went in the hole considering the repairs and loss .They stole the dishwasher , jerked it right out of the cabinet and the central heating and cooling unit.Whole interior had to be repainted and they filled one of the bathtubs with dirt.Like yard dirt.
We hauled off a whole trailer load of garbage they tossed in the yard.
I would never do it again.If you are lucky to get good tenants ,treat them right , you want to keep them or you may get absolutely awful people .

Much better to own your own place.

Landlording isn't inherently bad. Landlords provide a valuable service that many people need, including me.

The issue is that land value is not taxed highly enough, so people can make money from the value of their land going up even without doing any work. Landlording should be more like running a car hire business, where the asset's value is constantly depreciating and you have to do it up to maintain earnings, but because of the scarcity of housing and increased demand for land, that isn't typically the case.

Landlordism: A study

TL/DR: Landlordism is inherently unjust, exploitative, archaic, and can be replaced with a much better system.

Consider, first, that land cannot inherently be "owned", only occupied and/or held in stewardship. Further much of all the land in the Americas has been stolen from the First Nations by European settlers. By this state of affairs, the First Nations should be the rightful "owners" of all this land. This egregious error needs to be remedied.

Consider, then, the concept of generational wealth. Where individuals can be granted capital, many times immense amounts of such, merely by being born to the "correct" lineage. These individuals are then able to purchase land and/or already developed property, and without having done any real work to realize any of this. The Workers who are then forced to sell their Labor to said capitalist do not receive the housing they just built, nor anything comparable. More than likely, they must use the funds received from their labor to pay rent to that same class of people who "own" the property they merely purchased.

How is this arrangement just?

Consider further, that within this unjust system, many People are forced to live in conditions which do not reflect the actual work that they do. Some People are so stressed by this arrangement, they lose all sense of "right', and turn to "anti-social activities" (crime is inherently born of the society it occurs in. People wouldn't need to turn to "crime" or do destruction to or theft of property had they been given the things they need to survive, and/or given full "stewardship" of their residence, by the greater society) (referencing post above)

Landlords Are Parasites:
If we take this arrangement and categorize each interest into their proper, true position, we can see that landlordism is fundamentally an extractive/exploitative enterprise. The landlord merely uses their capital to obtain title on a property, and then uses that title to extract income from those People who do the actual work to build and maintain the property. The position of landlord is fundamentally parasitic.

A better system is one where each and every person is given the necessary things for survival by the greater society, and is guaranteed these things throughout their life.

A better system is one where any and all exploitative practices are not rewarded in any way, nor established as the bases of said society. The greater society is the "landlord", and there are no "middlemen" profiting off of unjust arrangements.

A better system is one where there is a robust social "safety net", which ensures that "anti-social" behavior is handled with care and understanding, and not either punished, in the case of those 'less fortunate", nor rewarded, in the case of state force being used for the theft of property/occupation.

When you say "all" and there is *one* exception, the whole statement is false

I'm a landlord. Some years are good for me and some are bad. Last year was a great year but the year before was terrible with someone trashing one of my houses.

I could also argue that this year was a bad one too seeing I had to pay an entire mortgage off totalling 75% of the house unexpectedly due to interest rate rises. I'm probably going to have to do that with another one in march too when that renewal is up but I won't have the money by then. I'll have to just let the fixed rate run out and chew into it.

Paying rent can be very expensive depending on the location but owning houses can be expensive irrespective of location.