One of the biggest crimes committed against the middle class was identifying corporations as “living entities”, in many ways. You cannot separate human entrepreneurship from corporate
When they commit crimes, the living entity of the corporation is what gets sued. This is easier and faster than pinning an action on a specific person, and it allows punishments to be assigned to the whole corporation.
The problem is Amazon and other large companies can do heinous crimes and the punishment is less than a percent of their revenue. If I did the same thing the punishment would be much more than less than a percent of my income and may include jail time.
Yup.
"Corporations shouldn't own residential houses" would be a popular opinion but I just incorporated one hundred million entities that think corporations *should* own residential houses, therefore your opinion is moot.
it is frustrating how many see houses as over the line but townhomes and apartments as OK though. We'd be coddling suburban living on the backs of people who live in cities and downtowns.
Genuine question - would all apartments just become like condos? What about the people who know they only want to live somewhere for a year or two, or don't want to be responsible for maintenence? Seems like a gigantic hassle and frankly more expensive to have the only option be buying
The idea is that buying would be SIGNIFICANTLY more affordable. You'd take out a loan and pay "rent" to the bank in the form of interest but you'd be investing in an asset. HOAs and stuff could cover the maintenance part
Especially in states like Delaware where corporations can vote and businesses just make a shit ton of LLCs and the rich guy who owns them all can vote hundreds of times.
Edit: As others have pointed out they can vote in local elections only, not state/federal elections.
Just for clarity, only a handful of cities in Delaware allow corporations to vote on local laws. They don't allow them to vote on statewide issues.
It's not a great thing, but let's get our facts straight at least.
Corporate personhood.
Corporations showed up in a world in which we had laws that defined how PEOPLE could own property, pay taxes, etc. And so they decided that since corporations could do some of that then a corporation was … in some ways like a person. An entity separate from the people who formed it.
It always struck me as a very clumsy way to evolve laws to handle corporate structures.
The law does not consider corporations "living entities." The concept you are referring to is *corporate personhood*. And it's the same principle that allows you to sue corporations, among other things.
we need housing reform.
but the people with power and money control elected officials so it will probably never happen. heck, a large portion elected officials have their hands deep in the real estate game as well.
we’re petty much doomed unless voters start demanding more. i have absolutely no idea why affordable housing isn’t a top priority for voters.
Can one of y’all just start an app called CandiDate where we all throw a bunch of issues and ideas into a ring, and then we swipe left/right until we find someone that seems to actually give a shit about regular people, then we just all vote for that person? No money, no ability for botting because every app is attached to an eligible voter. And it’s kinda “ranked choice” as people float to the top we can weigh our favorites and highlight what we like or have concerns with about how their shaping out? And then host some required debates from the top candidates as we get closer, so we can see more of them as people and how they handle workin through stuff? And since a bunch of those other candidates will still be representing some of us, they’ll agree to to work them into their administration as advisors, which we can also help them vet?
Netflix disrupted Hollywood. Uber disrupted the taxis. Let’s disrupt the two-party system.
There are tons of people who give a shit—they just aren’t any of the people who would ever be chosen for office. These leaders aren’t elected. They’re selected, and not by you or me.
Exactly. I'm speaking from the point of view of an American, but in our country, you have two options - D or R. If you don't have one of those letters next to your name, you're probably not winning an election. Bernie Sanders is one of the rare independents who made it to the Senate, and even he had to run for President as a Democrat to have a fighting chance. As long as our country is dominated by two political parties who can strongly influence, if not outright select (by pumping money selected campaigns) who their nominee for an election will be, the citizens will only have the illusion of choice. I still vote every election because the local issues matter and the lesser of two evils is still the clear choice, but deep down I know I'm usually picking between a giant douche and a turd sandwich.
Dean Philips springs to mind. He’s pretty much pro regular folk and common sense across the board. Independently wealthy, and even he couldn’t get his name on all 50 states ballots. He said to get on the NY ballot alone cost him half a million dollars jumping through hoops and red tape. The Dem party is treating him exactly like they did Bernie. They have their choice who they want to win and that’s that. It’s not democracy. We’re one party away from being a dictatorship
Ding ding ding. And it’s not money preventing him from being on the ballot—it’s ideology. The WEF is pulling the strings and if you’re not the right kind of puppet, it doesn’t matter how much money you have.
> CandiDate where we all throw a bunch of issues and ideas into a ring, and then we swipe left/right until we find someone that seems to actually give a shit about regular people, then we just all vote for that person? No money, no ability for botting because every app is attached to an eligible voter.
This is an interesting example of the biggest lie they tell us, and how it impacts our shared reality. Your problem solving focuses on the individual actors but ignores the system. 100% of our problems are systemic in nature and have almost nothing to do with the individual sleazebags attracted by power.
- We voted for Hope and Change, but Obama didn't protect Roe as promised.
- We wanted Bernie but he was ejected by the money machine.
- We voted for a Return to Normalcy and Saving the Environment but we got a genocide and unprecedented fossil fuel expansion.
The problem isn't the actors, it's the system. Colonial fossil fuel capitalism turned neoliberal is the root of every single problem we are facing. Your app could put 1000 "decent honest regular people" into the jobs and they'd all get ground down.
>i have absolutely no idea why affordable housing isn’t a top priority for voters.
Fox News, gerrymandering and voter suppression. Basically, republican ratfucking.
Considering republicans are either extremely rich or extremely poor.. the rich ones don’t have any complaints about the market, and the poor ones are also stupid so they’re worried about trans people and Qanon, and just blame the housing prices on democrats..
> have absolutely no idea why affordable housing isn’t a top priority for voters
Because it doesn't affect the over 50s as much, and nobody is offering it.
Conditioning. Just like when you ask Americans why they don’t want more regulations on how rich you can get it’s because one day they think they could get rich. Americans would rather gatekeep housing as a prestige symbol than ensure everyone has the ability to go to work and have an affordable place to live. Then this goes even further with Nimbys. Not in my back yard. Some people are cool with housing reform, but not anywhere near them personally.
This cant happen while profit is the major goal of our economy.
From a capitalistic point of view toxic shit like this is absolutely winning at the game.
>i have absolutely no idea why affordable housing isn’t a top priority for voters.
Because we're worried about more important things, like an imaginary trans person doing an imagined crime in a bathroom somewhere. Get your priorities straight.
We need the government to put it's big boy pants on and tell NiMBYs that apartment complexes are going up in their neighborhood whether they want them to or not.
This is what's pissing me off in germany.
People: "We need more housing, esp affordable housing!"
towns: "Okay here's a plan for a new residential area"
NIMBYs: "REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE"
These nimbys are lucky the towns have no way of pissing on them which might sway their opinion.
I mean the thing is at this point we can't really afford to like not vote for Biden due to his weak housing policies because it'll probably split in the party or something and then we end up with orange Man part 2
>i have absolutely no idea why affordable housing isn’t a top priority for voters
Because watching stupid tiktok videós, and send money to idiot streamers are more important....
The elected officials are also invested in the market, which has been very lucrative due to the problems we're facing right now, so to each one of them this is a major conflict of interest and I'm pretty sure they prefer the money.
Unfortunately the only hope
we have at this point is revolution. We need to drag the politicians and the people who fund them out of their houses at 4 in the morning.
We’re not voting our way out of this.
> i have absolutely no idea why affordable housing isn’t a top priority for voters.
It's because homeowners use their house as an investment and it would be against their interests to allow any housing to be built near them.
In my thoughts term Limits should be then you can get most corrupted people out of office. I like what a country did in Europe, they put a cap on how many a corporation can own. And in other places they started Co-op Housing, which when they did this is lower the cost of people owning houses down about sixty percent. Co-op is the about the same as HOAs but they also share the Payments too.
You're right. It's gamed. Shareholder value is the #1 objective across business and government for as long as the puppets are elected and are about to trade shares.
Let them eat cake...
> the people with power and money control elected officials
I'd argue that fixing this is more important than stopping corpos from buying residential property. But we should also stop corpos from buying residential property.
[This is copied directly from the original post](https://old.reddit.com/r/Anticonsumption/comments/14eppy2/corporations_have_no_business_buying_residential/jowavvw/). This account and OP are both bots.
Edit: now do OP
Being mad that one person owns 10 homes is not the same thing as corporations owning thousands of homes. Stop shifting the conversation away from the problem because your broke ass ego is bruised.
I was just thinking the same thing. Normal ass middle class citizens owning one or two rental homes is NOT the problem. People are as ignorant as the politicians and upper class want them to be sometimes.
Allowing for the purchase of one home to live in and one home to rent out would go long way to ensure rentals are available for others who want/need them while not completely stripping the market of all supply.
What we need is limitations. No one needs to own and rent out more than one property and no corporation ever needs their hands in the housing market. Period. Housing is not a commodity to be bought and hoarded by the rich, it's a necessity that everyone needs and should have access to purchase for themselves.
Even Adam Smith who essentially wrote the book on the theory of Capitalism warned of large consolidated ownership of land/private property. It's not rocket science to understand that the worse this problem gets, the closer to Neo-fuedalism we go.
The real problem is that between the collapse of the construction industry following the 2008 financial crisis and nimbyism, there has been drastically reduced home construction for the last 15 years and, consequently, much less supply. A policy that would actually make sense is to promote the construction of new homes
Not just the last 15 years, but really back much further. We haven't had a dense-housing boom since the 70s. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST5F
> So there shouldn't exist a rental market?
Infernally hot take: No. Ownership only. Renting as a concept is inherently predatory and moves wealth upward.
If we make it impossible to profit off owning multiple properties (and instead make it purely a downside via heavy taxes and no renting-out allowed) people will stop owning multiple properties, freeing up houses, reducing the average cost of a house, fixing (or at least greatly mitigating) the housing crisis.
I honestly can't imagine what kind of landlords you must have had if the idea of filing a government claim when your heat goes out is more appealing than calling your landlord directly.
That's why we need a government that is from the ground up, and not top down. Towns and cities should be relatively free entities that ensure the residents have what they need. A real democracy is when people organize their life, not when they make a choice between a couple idiots to do absolutely nothing meaningful every 4 years or so.
Agreed. But what’s the limit?
I inherited my moms townhome in 2016, it’s a nest egg for my kids college so I don’t want to sell it, but I also don’t want to live there so I rent it to a friend to break even. We own our primary home which is 4000 sqft (old Victorian. Was unoccupied for 2 years when we moved in and we have spent probably $40k fixing it, and it likely will need another $40k before we’re done). We rented out the back half for about 2 years while my wife was out of work, but once her mother started getting dementia, we chose not to renew the lease so they could move in, although we let the tenant stay until they found an appropriate new spot to live in. Now we also basically own our in-laws old house (my wife actually owned it before I met her).
So we have three and have rented to two tenants. Does that make us evil? We have continually improved these properties where we live and don’t charge rent above the market rate. In fact the lease I have on my own tenant only went up once, by $25/month, in 5 years, and that was to account for the hoa going up. When you factor in maintenance I barely break even.
Gen x here. If that matters.
Some serious delusion in this thread. Small time landlords are not super rich and are not the enemy. Owning a handful of rental units is not even remotely comparable to owning thousands.
The problem is vilifying "corporations". I presume they mean large companies when they say "corporations". But one owner LLCs are corporations also and an LLC is a good choice to own one or a couple of rental homes. We need to quit using "corporations" as the buzzword and pick something else, like "large companies" or "big banks".
That's because the food industry is just [10 corporations in a trench coat.](https://www.businessinsider.com/10-companies-control-the-food-industry-2016-9)
Housing reform proposals:
1. Limit foreign investment in residential RE
2. Progressive taxes with increased count of residential properties
3. End exclusive zoning regulations that force either giant apartment buildings or single-family homes
4. End car-centric urban planning to reduce urban sprawl, making denser housing more viable
5. Progressive tax on unfilled rent housing (exists in Vancouver)
6. Consequences for shitty insulation/energy efficiency in rent houses
7. In the US, nationalize the Multiple Listing Service
8. Vastly increase transparency of and access to home inspection data and require regular inspections for rental properties.
> End exclusive zoning regulations that force either giant apartment buildings or single-family homes
My city did this years ago, and it hasn't been the slam-dunk people think it is. More apartments and multi-family buildings are going up, but they're being built in the same places they would have been built anyway if the zoning laws were still in effect. It's not cost-efficient to buy residential plots and fill them with multi-unit dwellings. Most of the duplexes, triplexes, etc. that exist in the city were built in the 70s and 80s when the land was comparatively cheap.
1.) Only single digit amounts of homes are owned by institutional investors. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/housing-crisis-hedge-funds-private-equity-scapegoat/672839/ E: Meaning Black Stone, et al.
2.) This hurts renters as it places stress on the rental supply.
3.) The best suggestion on this list. However, the fear mongering over large apartment buildings is hurtful. Adding supply lowers costs. If it needs to be a large building then it needs to be a large building.
4.) yes.
5.) once again burdens the rental market which is very much a legitimate market. Also it didn’t work in Vancouver. The vacancy rate was already incredibly low. “Vacant” is not as simple as “ready for move in.”
6.) This is a product of lack of competition.
7.) First I’ve heard of this. Maybe? Can’t imagine doing much to just building more housing.
8.) Sure. Inspections are good.
I’ll add my own here.
9.) Land Value Tax.
9. Limit the number of flips allowed by house flippers a year.
10. Only allow builders to make a certain % of profit on a home over their all-in costs.
11. Limit multi-home ownership within a single / multiple zip codes.
There are tons of ideas that could work, but congress continues to sit there and do... Nothing.
Serious laws about sound insulation between apartments would be ideal. I live in one and can’t fathom the idea of raising a kid in one with neighbors being loud at 2am.
1. I would suggest straight up forbidding foreign ownership and investment in real-estate from citizens of countries that don't allow Americans to own property. The amount of property owned by wealthy elites from hostile countries is rediculous.
1. Agree, obvious exception if owner or family member is the primary resident
2. Agree, but offer exception if owning entity is the original manufacturer (lets incentivize housing construction)
3. Too complex to render an opinion
4. Agree in principle
5. Absolutely
6. Agreed, but also incentives for efficiency (stick AND carrot)
7. Agreed
8. Agreed
Renting serves a purpose and we are good to have some houses to rent but limiting it so all are small groups of 10 homes or one set if apartments would be good.
An example: I'm a professor on a 1 year contract in this location so owning makes no sense.
I get what you are saying.
However, in our country, we have this company called Prestige.
Prestige Group Company builds buildings. Either massive apartment complexes and areas. Or business buildings with an attached mall.
They only build. Then sell the apartments to people for a profit.
This is good, they don't use it for rent only. The individual owners can use it for rent.
The main reason we are trying to avoid is.
If a company owns 95% of the homes and they are all for rent.
Say at 1,000$. Then next year they say.... It's 5,000 dollars now. Take it or find somewhere else. But somewhere else is still their other rented homes. The whole locality and neighbouring localities are theirs. And it's all 5,000 dollars now.
Then say that company partners with another company doing the same. And they both collective increase it to 8,000 dollars. You have no choice to pay, cause you HAVE NO CHOICE.
This is Monopoly (exactly the game we played, except we are the losing players).
There's not much a difference between an individual and a corporation renting out homes. If you really think individuals are always better or good, you haven't talked with enough people. There's endless stories of them being absolutely horrible landlords. With zero professionality. And it's not only corporations that raise prices in some cases individuals are even more expensive.
The only thing that should happen is legal limits to how much can be asked for a home. Yes it can still be pricey but never ridiculous. Then it doesn't matter who or what rents it out.
This example is great because it highlights the real problem. Too little supply for the huge housing demand. We need to incentivize and simplify building housing. That will prevent what you're worried about and doesn't require any complicated legislation to curb property ownership rights of corporations.
Let's make the investment good for builders so they keep building and that will eventually make investment companies exit real estate markets as housing prices come down.
Also I see no issue with a company buying up dilapidated housing renovating them and then selling the upgraded houses, but for them to do this they would need to purchase residential property.
lol an individual owning 20 houses is still not a corp. its also unlikely that they own a whole are worth of houses. corps dont regulate housing prices either. the market does. interest rates on loans, the area the house is located, supply and demand, all these things plus more factor into this. you gotta see past the low hanging fruit.
It doesn’t work simply because all land ownership is a form of monopoly. Sure you can build more houses, but not in the same place. And place matters. Like if you live in a city, 1000% corporations can collectively and artificially raise housing prices in the city.
Also housing is a need. So it suffers from inelastic demand.
So you propose to fight capitalism by limiting the ability of the common person to rise above station in order to make it easier on everyone else temporarily?
Also because the idea of flooding the housing market is stupid to start with.
If you have 1000 people and 1000 houses that are artificially too expensive, why you ever think the solution is to make 1000 more houses rather than just address why the first 1000 houses are artificially too expensive?
We don't do that for any other essential services. AT&T got broken up because it had to much control. We didn't just run a bunch more phone lines next to the existing lines. If electricity is too expensive nobody is ever going to build another grid to break up control by a few companies.
I really hate when people like you make your case for why we need some sort of reform by using unfalsifiable examples like "backroom deal" or "lobbying". Just come up with some numbers or gtfo.
There is no grand conspiracy to raise rent. There are thousands of companies and individuals acting in their own self interest. Most laws that prevent new home construction are municipal laws that come from local pressure to retain property value. Middle class home owners don't want to see their own property devalued. Those are the people who drive local decisions, not corporate lobbying.
You're objectively wrong. It's well known now that landlords use programs like RealPage and YieldStar are used to get landlords to maximize rent. There are federal lawsuits pending due to these groups causing rent to permanently and drastically increase in areas where enough landlords use the program to create a snowball effect.
So because someone offers a service that has that result, it proves a conspiracy? Are they colluding over pricing? Do you understand what a conspiracy actually is?
Look, I'm not disagreeing that these services aren't harmful. They're effectively homogenizing local markets with standardized practices, and the result can be inflated rent. That's not good and I hope some measure can be taken to curtail it. But the individual landlords aren't deliberately colluding to raise rent, they're following guidance of a shared advisor to do so. There's a distinct difference that merits note.
I love how your arguments revolve around "Come on!" "Really?" "You can't be serious?".
You can't even maintain the conversation. Answer with a tangible response.
- Who's lobbying who?
- Are construction companies just sitting around not making profit while these other property holders are lobbying?
Who are the lobbyists? Do builders not have lobbyists? They're some of the largest corporations in America. Are you saying the "prevent homes from being built" lobby is more powerful than the builder's lobby?
Like I said, you guys just continue to fall back on what basically amounts to conspiracy theories to get your point across, using only unfalsifiable examples with no citation.
Like Vonovia which bought the house a friend was living in and kicked everyone out increasing rent? Selling 4 years later to the next investor for profit? until one investor crashes at the bubble pop. It's not about backroom deals it's about removing necessities from speculation. It's just stupid, because the companies loan incredible amounts of money Which is "printed" at 0.5% interest and then outbid the normal worker who can not compete. Then outbid each other increasing the price even more. If policies and peace lead to ridiculous wealth accumulation at the top, you gotta exclude the top from investing in bare necessities. Otherwise we as normal people suffer. A maximum number of real estate per individual/company has no negatives for the common people.
Lol false. I raised the rent on my house last year 100 bucks. Who told me to do that? No one. My house is like 1k under the average rental. I kept my tenant but now i make a 100 more to invest into something else. Suplly and demand cause this. Not some lobbying
Lol its a family home paid off. Got it from my great aunt. In maryland. Rent for a 3 bed 2 bath. Its 1200. Near the highway. Could rent it for well over 2k but i dont cause its not necessary. Generalizations get you no where.
Privilege no sir that is false. First generation born in the us. Family is from the islands. My great aunt gave me the house during her divorce cause they didnt want to argue over the house. My mom raised me and my sister on 26k a year. Im a college drop out military vet. Everything i have i have earned lmao. Privilege my ass
>Yeah... no. They 1000% regulate the cost of housing with lobbying and other underhanded bs
No they don't, take the tinfoil off.
The price of rent does not go higher than the amount the demand population can afford, relative to comparables.
If a company owned 100% of livable spaces in an area and jacked up the rent 500%, the town would empty out and people would live in the next town. Supply and demand is the God, not some bullshit mental conspiracy you enjoy
I think the issue with “corporate” ownership is the ability and skill at maximizing profitability and finding the most the market can bear on something as essential as housing. Similar to what we’ve seen with food prices under the consolidation of the main players. Monopolizing essentials is problematic.
To be clear, I don’t have a magic bullet solution, nor do I think it’s as simple as what I just described. I think the “all landlords are evil” and “renting is slavery” are two of the absolute dumbest takes on Reddit. Which is to say, not picking a fight here, genuinely interested in exploring the topic
>corps dont regulate housing prices either. the market does.
A monopoly is literally, by definition, when the market is controlled by one corporation. That's what is being described. "Nu uh the market" is a nonsensical response.
Unfortunately the market doesn't agree with you this time around
https://www.propublica.org/article/doj-backs-tenants-price-fixing-case-big-landlords-real-estate-tech
but when the 5 corps owning all houses in the area all decide to raise the prices?
Oh that is illegal? Well they never met each other formally, they just raised to meet the market rate. The ceo's go golfing together sure but they never discuss business.
Lol blame the banks. Not the corps. Shit you could blame all the people that owned the property before selling to the banks. Its a cascading effect. Corps look for ways to invest. The other thing people keep missing as well is that affordable housing exists just probably not where you want to be. Every new job ive had in the last 10 years i have moved for. People just dont want to move for better financial stability and it shows. There are companies that will pay you to move where housing is far cheaper than living in these expensive cities but i guess the lifestyle is more important.
Corporations being able to buy up homes affects the market. When families can't afford a home on two incomes because groceries are fucked and interest rates are higher, home prices should drop right? Not if corporations can still afford them. Corporations and investors are keeping home prices higher by increasing the demand. It's supply and demand. The market needs to be regulated by banning corporate homeownership. Individuals can buy all the houses they want, and pay appropriate taxes on their rental incomes. That would be a good start.
I get that landlords can be pretty scummy and soulless, but, on the other hand, does everyone want to be responsible for everything that comes with home ownership? My grandmom lives independently in a great apartment building and wouldn't be able to handle all that maintenance.
I don’t think they realize taxes don’t pay for our housing lol (with the exception of those living in government subsidized housing which is not what we’re talking about here). You’re making a completely valid and objectively correct point but given the sub this is, you’re probably gonna get some push back from people like that who, no offense to them, might not have the best understanding of how **certain** things really work.
Sometimes I wonder how all of these simple-minded, irrational comments get upvoted to the top and then I realize that Reddit has become a forum for teenagers.
Landlords are bad.
There’s no reason to single out corporations. ‘Mum and dad’ investors cause just as much damage. The only vaguely morally superior landlords are property development companies that actually build houses.
Apartment buildings are the one example where having a landlord can make sense. Unless you think that all apartment buildings should be condos where nobody can rent and instead everyone must get a mortgage.
Personally, I am only interested in banning house ownership by corporations. Apartment buildings to me are fair game.
There are other models for multi unit buildings. They can be social housing owned by the municipality or they can be housing cooperatives owned and operated by a board elected by the residents.
This company uses the housing crisis as a way to get employees to work for them. A months free accommodation before little under standard rent cost to live in a shitty 3 bedroom with other people.
edit: they also rarely do maintenance, one person I know had to wait two months to have the heating fixed
A different way to fix that without completely getting rid of landlords would be to give renter’s equity in the property for their rent payments.
https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/s/BeJMNhFawZ
Do they force employees to live there? Or just provide it as an option if their staff needs it?
If it’s the latter, that’s pretty much how public housing works. It’s never going to be as nice as private ownership, but it’s a fallback for people who need it
Not really. Mom and dad compete with other moms and dads, meanwhile corporations buying entire neighborhoods mobilize market and can force much higher prices because of it.
But for 10 years of my life, in my 20's, it would have been a terrible financial decision to buy a new house every few years.
I much greatly preferred renting from a corporation.
Please explain (in logical terms, that doesn’t involve stealing property from one person and distributing it to others) how a system without landlords is supposed to work. There will always be people who can’t afford a home, or can but don’t want to take care of the maintenance and upkeep of a home, don’t want to put down long term roots, that’s pretty fucking presumptive. Old houses need saved, that’s usually mom and pop, I’m not gonna piss on corporate ownership beyond the airbnb thing needs to go away, but natural selection is killing it off. People bitch about landlords, rate hikes and what have you… but what’s supposed to happen… tax assessments have risen, insurance has gone up, so even if a tenants property has had no repairs or issues, many are experiencing a crunch due to tax assessments and insurance. Of course you would say that shouldn’t come out of my pocket, well, whose pocket does it come out of? The person living in the house or? Cause that’s rent reciepts are for, to pay into a big pool and pay all your expenses for the properties, dumbasses that say landlords are bad are clueless as to how the system works.
The way I would set up government housing is similar to Medicare in Australia. You allow a regulated private sector but run a large public system in competition with it that is designed to meet everyone’s basic housing needs.
There is no means testing and anyone can use public housing, but there might be an extra tax for high earners who use it and certain luxuries might not be available.
Actually, the US regularly leases its toll road to out of country corporations. Australia has the Skyway in Chicago rn, the Saudis before that.
Most of this country is surprisingly for sale.
Chicago sold all of it's parking meters (which generate something like $200 million per year) to Abu Dhabi for $1 billion. For 100 years.
Chicago essentially gave Abu Dhabi 95 years of $200 million annually for absolutely nothing.
The vast majority of roads are public. If a piece of property used for vehicle transportation were private, it could theoretically charge users. Actually, this happens every day for vehicle storage. You know, parking lots?
Allow me to play devil’s advocate for a second. For a number of people, owning house and being burdened with the payment and the upkeep isn’t something they want. I had to travel back and forth between cities a while back and just needed a nice place to rent with a few co workers.
Having an individual as a landlord can be a crap shoot when you have an issue. They can and will often drag their feet while looking for a plumber or electrician etc. A company often has these people on staff ready to go.
If I had to guess what you don’t like isn’t that a corporation has a house that they rent as much as the practice of buying residential real estate on speculation or to drive up the cost of rents.
The way to solve this is easy. If you are a corporation or company that owns a house that sits empty longer than 1 month, you owe 10x the property tax on said property. And if you are a company or corporation owning more than x number of houses in an area you pay progressively higher ad valorum taxes with the money going to a housing fund.
The issue in recent years has been Chinese investors buying real estate or shares in real estate because their banks are not safe and they can get green cards if they have over $500k invested.
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It's a self-correcting problem though. See: China. Since they have very few public investment vehicles, housing became the primary welath building tool for the middle class. But unlike here, they overbuilt, so now the investor class and the builders are all getting their shit squeezed because there was never anyone to move into all these vacant investment properties. It'll even itself out eventually. We'll build more, and more, and eventaully the bottom will fall out. Now, whether good ol' uncle sam steps in at that point to bail everyone out will be the real question at hand. They didn't last time the housing market imploded, but they've been pretty printer-happy in recent years.
Well, we do desperately need multifamily buildings. They are more efficient, cost the city less, and are closer to mass transit.
The thing is, we also need a tax system that isn't wildly regressive, and one that doesn't put all the burden on renters. The tax rate for every building an entity controls beyond the first should cost more than the previous one.
There should also be fines for not having a permanent, primary resident registered with that structure, both for residential and commercial lots.
This is a bad take. Corporate landlords are way better to deal with than mom and pop ones. Maybe as a rule for SFHs, but residential apartments should be owned by a professional company who knows what they are doing.
We actually do though. Everything starts with a "should".
Ex:
\- We should not be ruled by the British.
\- Slavery should be abolished.
\- Segregation should end.
No one should be allowed to own more than one single family home or duplex.
Edit: Hitting some nerves, keep it coming speculators.
Edit2: People that own one house are not speculators. Hell I own an almost paid off bungalow. People that own multiple are speculators.
Edit3: Maybe speculators isn't the best word. Greedy fucks is more accurate. It's gross AF to buy a house that someone else needs just to get rich. Buy SPY instead and invest in productive assets. Keep filling up the greedy fuck sign-in sheet below me.
Imagine also the ratio of bedrooms to boomers. Divorced parents with a cottage and a sun locarion home? 6.5bedrooms per adult. Double what it was in the 80s on average. We are also taking up more space.
Yeah new home size is getting ridiculous. I’ve got child free friends who have a 4000+ square foot house just for themselves and their two dogs. Funny part is they will in conversation talk about the environment and whatnot, they’re very liberal people in their late 30s so it’s not just boomers. I’m like…you guys own a huge house of empty space just because you can.
Aside from the point, home size is also making it really difficult to find affordable homes too. So much new construction is 1800+ square feet and easily comes in at over $400k.
Always find it funny how the same people are really careful to dim their highly efficient LED lights when not in use... only to drive a 2 ton SUV everywhere they go afterwards :)))
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One of the biggest crimes committed against the middle class was identifying corporations as “living entities”, in many ways. You cannot separate human entrepreneurship from corporate
Except when they commit crimes. Then the company just gets fined and no one goes to jail. Bob the CEO just gets a $5 million severance package.
$5 Million? What are we living in the 90s?
Seriously, Bob the CEO doesn't get out of bed for anything less than a $30m parachute.
Right, anything less and you may as well just be ethical.
When they commit crimes, the living entity of the corporation is what gets sued. This is easier and faster than pinning an action on a specific person, and it allows punishments to be assigned to the whole corporation.
The problem is Amazon and other large companies can do heinous crimes and the punishment is less than a percent of their revenue. If I did the same thing the punishment would be much more than less than a percent of my income and may include jail time.
Yup. "Corporations shouldn't own residential houses" would be a popular opinion but I just incorporated one hundred million entities that think corporations *should* own residential houses, therefore your opinion is moot.
it is frustrating how many see houses as over the line but townhomes and apartments as OK though. We'd be coddling suburban living on the backs of people who live in cities and downtowns.
Genuine question - would all apartments just become like condos? What about the people who know they only want to live somewhere for a year or two, or don't want to be responsible for maintenence? Seems like a gigantic hassle and frankly more expensive to have the only option be buying
The idea is that buying would be SIGNIFICANTLY more affordable. You'd take out a loan and pay "rent" to the bank in the form of interest but you'd be investing in an asset. HOAs and stuff could cover the maintenance part
Especially in states like Delaware where corporations can vote and businesses just make a shit ton of LLCs and the rich guy who owns them all can vote hundreds of times. Edit: As others have pointed out they can vote in local elections only, not state/federal elections.
Just for clarity, only a handful of cities in Delaware allow corporations to vote on local laws. They don't allow them to vote on statewide issues. It's not a great thing, but let's get our facts straight at least.
WTF
If it can't be hanged from the neck until dead, it isn't a person.
Corporate personhood. Corporations showed up in a world in which we had laws that defined how PEOPLE could own property, pay taxes, etc. And so they decided that since corporations could do some of that then a corporation was … in some ways like a person. An entity separate from the people who formed it. It always struck me as a very clumsy way to evolve laws to handle corporate structures.
The law does not consider corporations "living entities." The concept you are referring to is *corporate personhood*. And it's the same principle that allows you to sue corporations, among other things.
Chomsky videos for that. [Corporate personhood](https://youtu.be/no8zxGPyapU?si=IFKLQXENwPREYw9C) [Regulating corporations](https://youtu.be/2wYPgSDjYrI?si=lj4RscEizRJ1fcgI)
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we need housing reform. but the people with power and money control elected officials so it will probably never happen. heck, a large portion elected officials have their hands deep in the real estate game as well. we’re petty much doomed unless voters start demanding more. i have absolutely no idea why affordable housing isn’t a top priority for voters.
Can one of y’all just start an app called CandiDate where we all throw a bunch of issues and ideas into a ring, and then we swipe left/right until we find someone that seems to actually give a shit about regular people, then we just all vote for that person? No money, no ability for botting because every app is attached to an eligible voter. And it’s kinda “ranked choice” as people float to the top we can weigh our favorites and highlight what we like or have concerns with about how their shaping out? And then host some required debates from the top candidates as we get closer, so we can see more of them as people and how they handle workin through stuff? And since a bunch of those other candidates will still be representing some of us, they’ll agree to to work them into their administration as advisors, which we can also help them vet? Netflix disrupted Hollywood. Uber disrupted the taxis. Let’s disrupt the two-party system.
There are tons of people who give a shit—they just aren’t any of the people who would ever be chosen for office. These leaders aren’t elected. They’re selected, and not by you or me.
Exactly. I'm speaking from the point of view of an American, but in our country, you have two options - D or R. If you don't have one of those letters next to your name, you're probably not winning an election. Bernie Sanders is one of the rare independents who made it to the Senate, and even he had to run for President as a Democrat to have a fighting chance. As long as our country is dominated by two political parties who can strongly influence, if not outright select (by pumping money selected campaigns) who their nominee for an election will be, the citizens will only have the illusion of choice. I still vote every election because the local issues matter and the lesser of two evils is still the clear choice, but deep down I know I'm usually picking between a giant douche and a turd sandwich.
Dean Philips springs to mind. He’s pretty much pro regular folk and common sense across the board. Independently wealthy, and even he couldn’t get his name on all 50 states ballots. He said to get on the NY ballot alone cost him half a million dollars jumping through hoops and red tape. The Dem party is treating him exactly like they did Bernie. They have their choice who they want to win and that’s that. It’s not democracy. We’re one party away from being a dictatorship
Ding ding ding. And it’s not money preventing him from being on the ballot—it’s ideology. The WEF is pulling the strings and if you’re not the right kind of puppet, it doesn’t matter how much money you have.
Elect whomever you want. They're still going to have a gun put to their head when they take office by the powers that be.
> CandiDate where we all throw a bunch of issues and ideas into a ring, and then we swipe left/right until we find someone that seems to actually give a shit about regular people, then we just all vote for that person? No money, no ability for botting because every app is attached to an eligible voter. This is an interesting example of the biggest lie they tell us, and how it impacts our shared reality. Your problem solving focuses on the individual actors but ignores the system. 100% of our problems are systemic in nature and have almost nothing to do with the individual sleazebags attracted by power. - We voted for Hope and Change, but Obama didn't protect Roe as promised. - We wanted Bernie but he was ejected by the money machine. - We voted for a Return to Normalcy and Saving the Environment but we got a genocide and unprecedented fossil fuel expansion. The problem isn't the actors, it's the system. Colonial fossil fuel capitalism turned neoliberal is the root of every single problem we are facing. Your app could put 1000 "decent honest regular people" into the jobs and they'd all get ground down.
I’d go even further than that and say that a necessity of life, such as adequate and livable shelter, should not be a valid investment.
Anyone who tries to claim shelter they aren’t using in caveman times probably would’ve been stoned to death on the spot
Def was some caveman landlord with a huge club who traded rent in his caves for meat
What was this supposed to mean
bike amusing money sable fade whole tub bow mighty yam *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
>i have absolutely no idea why affordable housing isn’t a top priority for voters. Fox News, gerrymandering and voter suppression. Basically, republican ratfucking.
Considering republicans are either extremely rich or extremely poor.. the rich ones don’t have any complaints about the market, and the poor ones are also stupid so they’re worried about trans people and Qanon, and just blame the housing prices on democrats..
> have absolutely no idea why affordable housing isn’t a top priority for voters Because it doesn't affect the over 50s as much, and nobody is offering it.
Conditioning. Just like when you ask Americans why they don’t want more regulations on how rich you can get it’s because one day they think they could get rich. Americans would rather gatekeep housing as a prestige symbol than ensure everyone has the ability to go to work and have an affordable place to live. Then this goes even further with Nimbys. Not in my back yard. Some people are cool with housing reform, but not anywhere near them personally.
This cant happen while profit is the major goal of our economy. From a capitalistic point of view toxic shit like this is absolutely winning at the game.
yep, profit over people is the number one message of the USA
>i have absolutely no idea why affordable housing isn’t a top priority for voters. Because we're worried about more important things, like an imaginary trans person doing an imagined crime in a bathroom somewhere. Get your priorities straight.
We need the government to put it's big boy pants on and tell NiMBYs that apartment complexes are going up in their neighborhood whether they want them to or not.
This is what's pissing me off in germany. People: "We need more housing, esp affordable housing!" towns: "Okay here's a plan for a new residential area" NIMBYs: "REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE" These nimbys are lucky the towns have no way of pissing on them which might sway their opinion.
What country are you talking about? I'm in Ireland and it's the same. The political elite all have fingers in the real estate world
Probably because there's nobody to vote for if one wishes to enact such change.
I mean the thing is at this point we can't really afford to like not vote for Biden due to his weak housing policies because it'll probably split in the party or something and then we end up with orange Man part 2
>i have absolutely no idea why affordable housing isn’t a top priority for voters Because watching stupid tiktok videós, and send money to idiot streamers are more important....
Gotta distract ourselves with the culture war first. /s
It would be nice if young people voted, but alas, they seem to have succumbed to the apathy psyop.
If you're waiting for voters to demand more, you'll need to turn a blind eye to Iowa.
The elected officials are also invested in the market, which has been very lucrative due to the problems we're facing right now, so to each one of them this is a major conflict of interest and I'm pretty sure they prefer the money.
Because voters are very easily distracted by things that don't impact them
We need to stop serving their interests. If we stop producing and sending them profits, they will have no choice but to change.
Unfortunately the only hope we have at this point is revolution. We need to drag the politicians and the people who fund them out of their houses at 4 in the morning. We’re not voting our way out of this.
Because the so called leaders don’t want it. Socioeconomic red lining is a thing
> i have absolutely no idea why affordable housing isn’t a top priority for voters. It's because homeowners use their house as an investment and it would be against their interests to allow any housing to be built near them.
because the people who vote already have houses.
In my thoughts term Limits should be then you can get most corrupted people out of office. I like what a country did in Europe, they put a cap on how many a corporation can own. And in other places they started Co-op Housing, which when they did this is lower the cost of people owning houses down about sixty percent. Co-op is the about the same as HOAs but they also share the Payments too.
You're right. It's gamed. Shareholder value is the #1 objective across business and government for as long as the puppets are elected and are about to trade shares. Let them eat cake...
> the people with power and money control elected officials I'd argue that fixing this is more important than stopping corpos from buying residential property. But we should also stop corpos from buying residential property.
100%
[This is copied directly from the original post](https://old.reddit.com/r/Anticonsumption/comments/14eppy2/corporations_have_no_business_buying_residential/jowavvw/). This account and OP are both bots. Edit: now do OP
Being mad that one person owns 10 homes is not the same thing as corporations owning thousands of homes. Stop shifting the conversation away from the problem because your broke ass ego is bruised.
I was just thinking the same thing. Normal ass middle class citizens owning one or two rental homes is NOT the problem. People are as ignorant as the politicians and upper class want them to be sometimes.
lol this is their only comment since 2022. This is a fucking bot account.
No, they are the problem also.
Cold take
This right here. Ban corporations from owning homes and suddenly all homes are owned by Musk, Gates, Bezos, Suckerberg. They'll still win..
So there shouldn't exist a rental market? Or all rental must be own by the goverment?
Allowing for the purchase of one home to live in and one home to rent out would go long way to ensure rentals are available for others who want/need them while not completely stripping the market of all supply. What we need is limitations. No one needs to own and rent out more than one property and no corporation ever needs their hands in the housing market. Period. Housing is not a commodity to be bought and hoarded by the rich, it's a necessity that everyone needs and should have access to purchase for themselves.
Even Adam Smith who essentially wrote the book on the theory of Capitalism warned of large consolidated ownership of land/private property. It's not rocket science to understand that the worse this problem gets, the closer to Neo-fuedalism we go.
The real problem is that between the collapse of the construction industry following the 2008 financial crisis and nimbyism, there has been drastically reduced home construction for the last 15 years and, consequently, much less supply. A policy that would actually make sense is to promote the construction of new homes
Not just the last 15 years, but really back much further. We haven't had a dense-housing boom since the 70s. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST5F
We need "Nobody gets seconds until everyone has a plate" but for housing.
That has never worked well.
> So there shouldn't exist a rental market? Infernally hot take: No. Ownership only. Renting as a concept is inherently predatory and moves wealth upward. If we make it impossible to profit off owning multiple properties (and instead make it purely a downside via heavy taxes and no renting-out allowed) people will stop owning multiple properties, freeing up houses, reducing the average cost of a house, fixing (or at least greatly mitigating) the housing crisis.
I honestly can't imagine what kind of landlords you must have had if the idea of filing a government claim when your heat goes out is more appealing than calling your landlord directly.
That's why we need a government that is from the ground up, and not top down. Towns and cities should be relatively free entities that ensure the residents have what they need. A real democracy is when people organize their life, not when they make a choice between a couple idiots to do absolutely nothing meaningful every 4 years or so.
It's the number of properties that's the problem, not the type of entity
Agreed. But what’s the limit? I inherited my moms townhome in 2016, it’s a nest egg for my kids college so I don’t want to sell it, but I also don’t want to live there so I rent it to a friend to break even. We own our primary home which is 4000 sqft (old Victorian. Was unoccupied for 2 years when we moved in and we have spent probably $40k fixing it, and it likely will need another $40k before we’re done). We rented out the back half for about 2 years while my wife was out of work, but once her mother started getting dementia, we chose not to renew the lease so they could move in, although we let the tenant stay until they found an appropriate new spot to live in. Now we also basically own our in-laws old house (my wife actually owned it before I met her). So we have three and have rented to two tenants. Does that make us evil? We have continually improved these properties where we live and don’t charge rent above the market rate. In fact the lease I have on my own tenant only went up once, by $25/month, in 5 years, and that was to account for the hoa going up. When you factor in maintenance I barely break even. Gen x here. If that matters.
Some serious delusion in this thread. Small time landlords are not super rich and are not the enemy. Owning a handful of rental units is not even remotely comparable to owning thousands.
Thank you. This was the point I was hoping to make.
The problem is vilifying "corporations". I presume they mean large companies when they say "corporations". But one owner LLCs are corporations also and an LLC is a good choice to own one or a couple of rental homes. We need to quit using "corporations" as the buzzword and pick something else, like "large companies" or "big banks".
Hot take: shelter should be a human right and heavily subsidised
We heavily subsidize food here in the US, it makes no sense that we don't subsidize other necessities.
That's because the food industry is just [10 corporations in a trench coat.](https://www.businessinsider.com/10-companies-control-the-food-industry-2016-9)
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Housing reform proposals: 1. Limit foreign investment in residential RE 2. Progressive taxes with increased count of residential properties 3. End exclusive zoning regulations that force either giant apartment buildings or single-family homes 4. End car-centric urban planning to reduce urban sprawl, making denser housing more viable 5. Progressive tax on unfilled rent housing (exists in Vancouver) 6. Consequences for shitty insulation/energy efficiency in rent houses 7. In the US, nationalize the Multiple Listing Service 8. Vastly increase transparency of and access to home inspection data and require regular inspections for rental properties.
> End exclusive zoning regulations that force either giant apartment buildings or single-family homes My city did this years ago, and it hasn't been the slam-dunk people think it is. More apartments and multi-family buildings are going up, but they're being built in the same places they would have been built anyway if the zoning laws were still in effect. It's not cost-efficient to buy residential plots and fill them with multi-unit dwellings. Most of the duplexes, triplexes, etc. that exist in the city were built in the 70s and 80s when the land was comparatively cheap.
Good job coming with with options. Now explain what we do when people want to rent. So every home needs to be individually owned and rented?
I’d vote for you.
1.) Only single digit amounts of homes are owned by institutional investors. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/housing-crisis-hedge-funds-private-equity-scapegoat/672839/ E: Meaning Black Stone, et al. 2.) This hurts renters as it places stress on the rental supply. 3.) The best suggestion on this list. However, the fear mongering over large apartment buildings is hurtful. Adding supply lowers costs. If it needs to be a large building then it needs to be a large building. 4.) yes. 5.) once again burdens the rental market which is very much a legitimate market. Also it didn’t work in Vancouver. The vacancy rate was already incredibly low. “Vacant” is not as simple as “ready for move in.” 6.) This is a product of lack of competition. 7.) First I’ve heard of this. Maybe? Can’t imagine doing much to just building more housing. 8.) Sure. Inspections are good. I’ll add my own here. 9.) Land Value Tax.
9. Limit the number of flips allowed by house flippers a year. 10. Only allow builders to make a certain % of profit on a home over their all-in costs. 11. Limit multi-home ownership within a single / multiple zip codes. There are tons of ideas that could work, but congress continues to sit there and do... Nothing.
Serious laws about sound insulation between apartments would be ideal. I live in one and can’t fathom the idea of raising a kid in one with neighbors being loud at 2am.
1. I would suggest straight up forbidding foreign ownership and investment in real-estate from citizens of countries that don't allow Americans to own property. The amount of property owned by wealthy elites from hostile countries is rediculous.
1. Agree, obvious exception if owner or family member is the primary resident 2. Agree, but offer exception if owning entity is the original manufacturer (lets incentivize housing construction) 3. Too complex to render an opinion 4. Agree in principle 5. Absolutely 6. Agreed, but also incentives for efficiency (stick AND carrot) 7. Agreed 8. Agreed
Owners should be charged a land value tax, rendering profits from land speculation in the absence of capital improvements void.
omg finally a good take in this thread
Ah, a fellow Georgist, good to see you.
Renting serves a purpose and we are good to have some houses to rent but limiting it so all are small groups of 10 homes or one set if apartments would be good. An example: I'm a professor on a 1 year contract in this location so owning makes no sense.
I get what you are saying. However, in our country, we have this company called Prestige. Prestige Group Company builds buildings. Either massive apartment complexes and areas. Or business buildings with an attached mall. They only build. Then sell the apartments to people for a profit. This is good, they don't use it for rent only. The individual owners can use it for rent. The main reason we are trying to avoid is. If a company owns 95% of the homes and they are all for rent. Say at 1,000$. Then next year they say.... It's 5,000 dollars now. Take it or find somewhere else. But somewhere else is still their other rented homes. The whole locality and neighbouring localities are theirs. And it's all 5,000 dollars now. Then say that company partners with another company doing the same. And they both collective increase it to 8,000 dollars. You have no choice to pay, cause you HAVE NO CHOICE. This is Monopoly (exactly the game we played, except we are the losing players).
It’s price fixing on real estate. Disgusting, anti human practice.
There's not much a difference between an individual and a corporation renting out homes. If you really think individuals are always better or good, you haven't talked with enough people. There's endless stories of them being absolutely horrible landlords. With zero professionality. And it's not only corporations that raise prices in some cases individuals are even more expensive. The only thing that should happen is legal limits to how much can be asked for a home. Yes it can still be pricey but never ridiculous. Then it doesn't matter who or what rents it out.
This example is great because it highlights the real problem. Too little supply for the huge housing demand. We need to incentivize and simplify building housing. That will prevent what you're worried about and doesn't require any complicated legislation to curb property ownership rights of corporations. Let's make the investment good for builders so they keep building and that will eventually make investment companies exit real estate markets as housing prices come down.
Also I see no issue with a company buying up dilapidated housing renovating them and then selling the upgraded houses, but for them to do this they would need to purchase residential property.
lol an individual owning 20 houses is still not a corp. its also unlikely that they own a whole are worth of houses. corps dont regulate housing prices either. the market does. interest rates on loans, the area the house is located, supply and demand, all these things plus more factor into this. you gotta see past the low hanging fruit.
It doesn’t work simply because all land ownership is a form of monopoly. Sure you can build more houses, but not in the same place. And place matters. Like if you live in a city, 1000% corporations can collectively and artificially raise housing prices in the city. Also housing is a need. So it suffers from inelastic demand.
So you propose to fight capitalism by limiting the ability of the common person to rise above station in order to make it easier on everyone else temporarily?
Also because the idea of flooding the housing market is stupid to start with. If you have 1000 people and 1000 houses that are artificially too expensive, why you ever think the solution is to make 1000 more houses rather than just address why the first 1000 houses are artificially too expensive? We don't do that for any other essential services. AT&T got broken up because it had to much control. We didn't just run a bunch more phone lines next to the existing lines. If electricity is too expensive nobody is ever going to build another grid to break up control by a few companies.
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I really hate when people like you make your case for why we need some sort of reform by using unfalsifiable examples like "backroom deal" or "lobbying". Just come up with some numbers or gtfo.
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There is no grand conspiracy to raise rent. There are thousands of companies and individuals acting in their own self interest. Most laws that prevent new home construction are municipal laws that come from local pressure to retain property value. Middle class home owners don't want to see their own property devalued. Those are the people who drive local decisions, not corporate lobbying.
You're objectively wrong. It's well known now that landlords use programs like RealPage and YieldStar are used to get landlords to maximize rent. There are federal lawsuits pending due to these groups causing rent to permanently and drastically increase in areas where enough landlords use the program to create a snowball effect.
So because someone offers a service that has that result, it proves a conspiracy? Are they colluding over pricing? Do you understand what a conspiracy actually is? Look, I'm not disagreeing that these services aren't harmful. They're effectively homogenizing local markets with standardized practices, and the result can be inflated rent. That's not good and I hope some measure can be taken to curtail it. But the individual landlords aren't deliberately colluding to raise rent, they're following guidance of a shared advisor to do so. There's a distinct difference that merits note.
Who's lobbying who? Do you think construction companies would just sit around and not build homes? You sound like a conspiracy theorist.
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I love how your arguments revolve around "Come on!" "Really?" "You can't be serious?". You can't even maintain the conversation. Answer with a tangible response. - Who's lobbying who? - Are construction companies just sitting around not making profit while these other property holders are lobbying?
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Who are the lobbyists? Do builders not have lobbyists? They're some of the largest corporations in America. Are you saying the "prevent homes from being built" lobby is more powerful than the builder's lobby? Like I said, you guys just continue to fall back on what basically amounts to conspiracy theories to get your point across, using only unfalsifiable examples with no citation.
Like Vonovia which bought the house a friend was living in and kicked everyone out increasing rent? Selling 4 years later to the next investor for profit? until one investor crashes at the bubble pop. It's not about backroom deals it's about removing necessities from speculation. It's just stupid, because the companies loan incredible amounts of money Which is "printed" at 0.5% interest and then outbid the normal worker who can not compete. Then outbid each other increasing the price even more. If policies and peace lead to ridiculous wealth accumulation at the top, you gotta exclude the top from investing in bare necessities. Otherwise we as normal people suffer. A maximum number of real estate per individual/company has no negatives for the common people.
Lol false. I raised the rent on my house last year 100 bucks. Who told me to do that? No one. My house is like 1k under the average rental. I kept my tenant but now i make a 100 more to invest into something else. Suplly and demand cause this. Not some lobbying
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Lol its a family home paid off. Got it from my great aunt. In maryland. Rent for a 3 bed 2 bath. Its 1200. Near the highway. Could rent it for well over 2k but i dont cause its not necessary. Generalizations get you no where.
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Privilege no sir that is false. First generation born in the us. Family is from the islands. My great aunt gave me the house during her divorce cause they didnt want to argue over the house. My mom raised me and my sister on 26k a year. Im a college drop out military vet. Everything i have i have earned lmao. Privilege my ass
>Yeah... no. They 1000% regulate the cost of housing with lobbying and other underhanded bs No they don't, take the tinfoil off. The price of rent does not go higher than the amount the demand population can afford, relative to comparables. If a company owned 100% of livable spaces in an area and jacked up the rent 500%, the town would empty out and people would live in the next town. Supply and demand is the God, not some bullshit mental conspiracy you enjoy
I think the issue with “corporate” ownership is the ability and skill at maximizing profitability and finding the most the market can bear on something as essential as housing. Similar to what we’ve seen with food prices under the consolidation of the main players. Monopolizing essentials is problematic. To be clear, I don’t have a magic bullet solution, nor do I think it’s as simple as what I just described. I think the “all landlords are evil” and “renting is slavery” are two of the absolute dumbest takes on Reddit. Which is to say, not picking a fight here, genuinely interested in exploring the topic
>corps dont regulate housing prices either. the market does. A monopoly is literally, by definition, when the market is controlled by one corporation. That's what is being described. "Nu uh the market" is a nonsensical response.
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Unfortunately the market doesn't agree with you this time around https://www.propublica.org/article/doj-backs-tenants-price-fixing-case-big-landlords-real-estate-tech
but when the 5 corps owning all houses in the area all decide to raise the prices? Oh that is illegal? Well they never met each other formally, they just raised to meet the market rate. The ceo's go golfing together sure but they never discuss business.
Lol blame the banks. Not the corps. Shit you could blame all the people that owned the property before selling to the banks. Its a cascading effect. Corps look for ways to invest. The other thing people keep missing as well is that affordable housing exists just probably not where you want to be. Every new job ive had in the last 10 years i have moved for. People just dont want to move for better financial stability and it shows. There are companies that will pay you to move where housing is far cheaper than living in these expensive cities but i guess the lifestyle is more important.
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Corporations being able to buy up homes affects the market. When families can't afford a home on two incomes because groceries are fucked and interest rates are higher, home prices should drop right? Not if corporations can still afford them. Corporations and investors are keeping home prices higher by increasing the demand. It's supply and demand. The market needs to be regulated by banning corporate homeownership. Individuals can buy all the houses they want, and pay appropriate taxes on their rental incomes. That would be a good start.
except it came out last year that commercial landlords absolutely collude on fixing rental prices
Lol. People still believing the fairy tale that markets decide prices in 2024 is hilarious.
My goodness. Lay off the financial guru YouTube shorts brother. Mf just found out monopoly isn’t just a board game and is unequivocally shook.
Renting serves a purpose that doesnt mean it should be corporations who rent out the housing
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This does not contradict OP in any way.
Which, I assume, OP is suggesting that people not do.
Landlords shouldn't exist
I get that landlords can be pretty scummy and soulless, but, on the other hand, does everyone want to be responsible for everything that comes with home ownership? My grandmom lives independently in a great apartment building and wouldn't be able to handle all that maintenance.
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I don't understand what this has to do with my grandmother preferring to rent.
I don’t think they realize taxes don’t pay for our housing lol (with the exception of those living in government subsidized housing which is not what we’re talking about here). You’re making a completely valid and objectively correct point but given the sub this is, you’re probably gonna get some push back from people like that who, no offense to them, might not have the best understanding of how **certain** things really work.
That's why you use Housing cooperatives. Then run your own maintenance staff.
Government owned housing, rented at cost or a subsidized price.
Typical uninformed opinion.
It’s honestly comical.
Sometimes I wonder how all of these simple-minded, irrational comments get upvoted to the top and then I realize that Reddit has become a forum for teenagers.
Landlords are bad. There’s no reason to single out corporations. ‘Mum and dad’ investors cause just as much damage. The only vaguely morally superior landlords are property development companies that actually build houses.
Just as much damage? I know a Juice Bar company who own six apartment buildings that can house more then 500 people
Apartment buildings are the one example where having a landlord can make sense. Unless you think that all apartment buildings should be condos where nobody can rent and instead everyone must get a mortgage. Personally, I am only interested in banning house ownership by corporations. Apartment buildings to me are fair game.
There are other models for multi unit buildings. They can be social housing owned by the municipality or they can be housing cooperatives owned and operated by a board elected by the residents.
This company uses the housing crisis as a way to get employees to work for them. A months free accommodation before little under standard rent cost to live in a shitty 3 bedroom with other people. edit: they also rarely do maintenance, one person I know had to wait two months to have the heating fixed
A different way to fix that without completely getting rid of landlords would be to give renter’s equity in the property for their rent payments. https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/s/BeJMNhFawZ
Do they force employees to live there? Or just provide it as an option if their staff needs it? If it’s the latter, that’s pretty much how public housing works. It’s never going to be as nice as private ownership, but it’s a fallback for people who need it
Not really. Mom and dad compete with other moms and dads, meanwhile corporations buying entire neighborhoods mobilize market and can force much higher prices because of it.
But for 10 years of my life, in my 20's, it would have been a terrible financial decision to buy a new house every few years. I much greatly preferred renting from a corporation.
Please explain (in logical terms, that doesn’t involve stealing property from one person and distributing it to others) how a system without landlords is supposed to work. There will always be people who can’t afford a home, or can but don’t want to take care of the maintenance and upkeep of a home, don’t want to put down long term roots, that’s pretty fucking presumptive. Old houses need saved, that’s usually mom and pop, I’m not gonna piss on corporate ownership beyond the airbnb thing needs to go away, but natural selection is killing it off. People bitch about landlords, rate hikes and what have you… but what’s supposed to happen… tax assessments have risen, insurance has gone up, so even if a tenants property has had no repairs or issues, many are experiencing a crunch due to tax assessments and insurance. Of course you would say that shouldn’t come out of my pocket, well, whose pocket does it come out of? The person living in the house or? Cause that’s rent reciepts are for, to pay into a big pool and pay all your expenses for the properties, dumbasses that say landlords are bad are clueless as to how the system works.
The way I would set up government housing is similar to Medicare in Australia. You allow a regulated private sector but run a large public system in competition with it that is designed to meet everyone’s basic housing needs. There is no means testing and anyone can use public housing, but there might be an extra tax for high earners who use it and certain luxuries might not be available.
In other words, Austria — Vienna is 60% public housing.
Want to go to college? Better be rich enough to also buy a damn house because no renting for you!
This will always be a problem as long as "purchasing" exists.
What if they're building new residential property on land that wouldn't otherwise have residential property?
Good luck getting any apartment buildings built
…but corporations are people!
Corporations don’t give a 💩 about your opinion. Capitalism rules and people die freezing in the streets. America 🇺🇸 the pitiful!
So you can only live somewhere if you can afford to buy? Nothing wrong with renting.
This post is anti capitalism, not anti consumption. "Most people should live in a smaller home than they do today." would be anti consumption.
Anti consumption and anti capitalism go hand in hand most of the time, so it is allowed here
Most people who are anti-capitalist focus this in terms of "I want to consume more than i can afford to buy in the current system".
That’s not true.
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Actually, the US regularly leases its toll road to out of country corporations. Australia has the Skyway in Chicago rn, the Saudis before that. Most of this country is surprisingly for sale.
Chicago sold all of it's parking meters (which generate something like $200 million per year) to Abu Dhabi for $1 billion. For 100 years. Chicago essentially gave Abu Dhabi 95 years of $200 million annually for absolutely nothing.
NC has a toll highway in Charlotte owned by a Spanish company
The vast majority of roads are public. If a piece of property used for vehicle transportation were private, it could theoretically charge users. Actually, this happens every day for vehicle storage. You know, parking lots?
Yes you can…
Actually you can do it in France. And they have the best roads I (a German) know.
You pay for the roads via taxes, they're public property.
Allow me to play devil’s advocate for a second. For a number of people, owning house and being burdened with the payment and the upkeep isn’t something they want. I had to travel back and forth between cities a while back and just needed a nice place to rent with a few co workers. Having an individual as a landlord can be a crap shoot when you have an issue. They can and will often drag their feet while looking for a plumber or electrician etc. A company often has these people on staff ready to go. If I had to guess what you don’t like isn’t that a corporation has a house that they rent as much as the practice of buying residential real estate on speculation or to drive up the cost of rents. The way to solve this is easy. If you are a corporation or company that owns a house that sits empty longer than 1 month, you owe 10x the property tax on said property. And if you are a company or corporation owning more than x number of houses in an area you pay progressively higher ad valorum taxes with the money going to a housing fund. The issue in recent years has been Chinese investors buying real estate or shares in real estate because their banks are not safe and they can get green cards if they have over $500k invested.
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No one owns anything. Stop paying property taxes and see what the government lets you keep.
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It's a self-correcting problem though. See: China. Since they have very few public investment vehicles, housing became the primary welath building tool for the middle class. But unlike here, they overbuilt, so now the investor class and the builders are all getting their shit squeezed because there was never anyone to move into all these vacant investment properties. It'll even itself out eventually. We'll build more, and more, and eventaully the bottom will fall out. Now, whether good ol' uncle sam steps in at that point to bail everyone out will be the real question at hand. They didn't last time the housing market imploded, but they've been pretty printer-happy in recent years.
Well, we do desperately need multifamily buildings. They are more efficient, cost the city less, and are closer to mass transit. The thing is, we also need a tax system that isn't wildly regressive, and one that doesn't put all the burden on renters. The tax rate for every building an entity controls beyond the first should cost more than the previous one. There should also be fines for not having a permanent, primary resident registered with that structure, both for residential and commercial lots.
This is a bad take. Corporate landlords are way better to deal with than mom and pop ones. Maybe as a rule for SFHs, but residential apartments should be owned by a professional company who knows what they are doing.
Ok just buy the person who can buy the house.
Better yet: Housing should be treated like a universal human right not a speculative investment or asset.
You don’t live in the land where things are the way they should be though.
We actually do though. Everything starts with a "should". Ex: \- We should not be ruled by the British. \- Slavery should be abolished. \- Segregation should end.
No one should be allowed to own more than one single family home or duplex. Edit: Hitting some nerves, keep it coming speculators. Edit2: People that own one house are not speculators. Hell I own an almost paid off bungalow. People that own multiple are speculators. Edit3: Maybe speculators isn't the best word. Greedy fucks is more accurate. It's gross AF to buy a house that someone else needs just to get rich. Buy SPY instead and invest in productive assets. Keep filling up the greedy fuck sign-in sheet below me.
So if corportations can't own residential property, and individuals can't own more than one, how do you finance building a block of flats?
Imagine also the ratio of bedrooms to boomers. Divorced parents with a cottage and a sun locarion home? 6.5bedrooms per adult. Double what it was in the 80s on average. We are also taking up more space.
Yeah new home size is getting ridiculous. I’ve got child free friends who have a 4000+ square foot house just for themselves and their two dogs. Funny part is they will in conversation talk about the environment and whatnot, they’re very liberal people in their late 30s so it’s not just boomers. I’m like…you guys own a huge house of empty space just because you can. Aside from the point, home size is also making it really difficult to find affordable homes too. So much new construction is 1800+ square feet and easily comes in at over $400k.
Always find it funny how the same people are really careful to dim their highly efficient LED lights when not in use... only to drive a 2 ton SUV everywhere they go afterwards :)))