I just saw this post about landlords being parasitic. While I agree in some points - mainly that by owning more property than you need for yourself, you’re driving up the price for others who want to buy a property. However, I don’t want to buy property when I move. I don’t have the funds for it, and I’m happy with a rented flat. Sure I want to get my own property at some point, however I’m also sure I want to move at least two more times in my life. Buying and selling each time sounds like a lot of hassle. Also, I live in a shared flat, that just sounds like a legal nightmare if the ownership changed every time someone moved out. How does this fit together? Are there solutions to this that don’t require landlords to exist?
One solution is community housing where the local government is the landlord and by extend the people in the area.
Another is housing cooperatives, which are groups of people pooling their money to build and operate housing. When joining, you acquire part of the ownership and when you leave you have to sell it.
TIL about housing cooperatives, and that about 6% in Germany live in one. Thanks!
Fairly common in Czechia, though it’s not that great. You formally own a share of the house which might come with the benefit of a flat. The cooperative can decide to move you out. Sure, you’ll still own the share, but if enough shareholders decide you’re out, you’re out. You want your kids to inherit the flat? Same thing applies, better hope there’s not someone who can sway others to not do it.
Shit like this isn’t something that happens often, but I personally know of three similar cases. Which is not a huge amount, but on the other hand I’m just one person. Definitely wouldn’t like those odds.
They’re very hard to come by, because usually it stays in the family.
I moved into one recently and the the process was pretty much like any other flat I rented before. You apply, get invited to visit the flat, you say yes or no, they say yes or no, done. The only difference was that instead of a deposit I was paying for shares of the cooperative. Maybe it’s different in smaller towns though, this was in a university town.
Coops already exist. Basically they’re already set up so that when people move in, they own part of it, and when they move out, they don’t. The technical legal details of it varies from your country, region, municipality, etc, but from my basic understanding, when you sign your contract, it includes saying “you own this building with us until you move out. We might ask you to move out if you poop in the communal garden.”
Edit: re-reading your post, I realize I’m not sure if you mean the entire building or a single unit, but either way you can have similar arrangements.
Yup. I used to live next to a housing coop. It
wasis (It’s still there, I just don’t live in that city anymore, hence my predispositionfor past tense) the “experimental” neighborhood of the city, so it attracted some rather interesting people as well, but the place was nice and it seemed to work pretty well. I used to walk via there twice a day between daycare and the most convenient bus stop.
To draw a parallel to the problem of health care - in systems of socialized medicine, a health insurer does de-facto exist, so health insurance does not get entirely abolished when switching to socialized medicine. It’s just that the health insurer is now the government, and the system is no longer ran to optimize for extracting money out of the system, but instead to optimize for population-level health.
Similarly, when trying to reform the housing market, landlords don’t fully go away - you can for example imagine a system where the government becomes a very large landlord and optimizes the system for maximum level of ‘people housed’ (or whatever you want to optimize this system for).
There are also various forms of housing cooperatives, where the landlord is a body consisting of all the tenants collectively.
The landlord most people want to be rid of is the rent-seeking kind, which optimizes the system for extracting money.
There are many reasons why renting is better for some people and buying is better for others.
Renting gives you the flexibility to just up sticks and leave at a known notice period. You don’t have to worry about the boiler breaking, or mould/damp, or the roof coming off (or like I’m about to have to deal with, a fence panel getting blown away in a storm) because your contact with the landlord says they’ll fix that for you.
There should absolutely be that choice available.
The problem, at least in the UK and probably elsewhere, is that renting is just SO expensive that it’s not possible to rent and save money, meaning that if your goal is to buy, you can’t because you can’t raise the deposit, even if paying a mortgage on a similar sized property would actually be cheaper on a monthly basis.
Sure, you read stories about people who are wonderful landlords, they don’t raise rents, or at least, by less than market rates, they’re quick to fix any problems the tenants have, all that good stuff.
Equally, you read stories about people who are basically renting from Satan and all the things I mentioned above take months or years to get fixed, if ever. (Slumlords are definitely people who should be put up against the wall and shot come the revolution)
I’m assuming the vast majority are somewhere in the middle.
But the fact that you’ll probably rent for at least some of your life shouldn’t drain all your money into someone else’s mortgage. As I said in that other post, housing of some form should be a basic human right. And the fact that individuals or companies can buy many houses and leave them empty because they can afford to have rents set so high that most people can’t afford them? That’s just wrong.
A part of the solution is “government owned housing” rented at fair price. Most countries have such housing for “poor people” but not enough for everyone. Let alone the whole “cut-down in welfare budget” means that these building are badly maintained and that even if you’re poor enough but not homeless (e.g. full time minimal wage) you still need years for your application to be accepted. I believe that Denmark and Austria are the few countries where this model is common even for middle class. It may-be a model to follow, at least for lower middle class
Denmark doesn’t have government owned housing rented at fair prices. It has housing orgs which are beholden to special laws but are still private businesses. Because these businesses own a whole block of apartments, they can strike good deals with the municipalities to house or accommodate the less fortunate. If you are middle-class then you do not live in a housing org that houses the lower class. We don’t share space.
I live in the cheapest apartment in my city in the best housing org arguably in the whole country and I still can’t pay rent and my landlord won’t come and fix the several missing doors. My neighbors are fruit-fly breeding enthusiast druggies who don’t have to get up in the morning for anything but groceries and love to party all night on any given weekday despite the housing org rules but the housing org won’t do shit about it so I regularly don’t get to sleep and the cops don’t respond to noise complaints from renters unless you live in a good neighborhood. I also don’t have hot water in my heating system but to be fair I haven’t told my landlord that because I can’t afford heating anyway.
Denmark does not have a housing model that should be an inspiration to the rest of the world, especially not since the jobcenter is also partly responsible for housing you if you’re out of the job market and entirely responsible for you and your rent if you are handicapped, both of which are conflicts of interest and they have been documented to hold this power over vulnerable people so they can continue to have their labor exploited through “activation” programs. I’m perfectly capable of working despite my handicaps. Alas, the jobcenter has struck deals with local businesses and they won’t give me any of those jobs I can do because the jobcenter can just force me to do it and then not pay me so I can’t ever hope to move to better pastures.
You might have been thinking of the Netherlands, but their government housing isn’t exactly a perfect system either but it’s better.
Decomodify housing.
The world is not black and white. Example: I am a rentee in Germany in a house with 16 flats. My landlord owns exactly one flat in this house, the one I live in. The house and the adjacent house is owned by a community of owners. They meet once a year for decisions of all kind. They employ the services of a buidling managament company that sees to things like light fixtures in the garage and stairwells, cleaning of stairwells, repairs, winter service, trash cans moved to the streets, etc. This ist the 4th or 5th rental flat I have lived in. About 50% of people in Germany live as rentees. It generally has been a good experience for me. Finding a suitable flat has been difficult last time, in 2022. Generally, I want this option. Buying a home does have it perks, but generally it is financially not the best option. Example: if I want to buy a flat in the vincinity of my rental appartement, same size, same facilities, I would have to fork over 400k€ at least. If I even find anything comparable. As of now, I pay 660€ of rent each month (+ utilities). That means, that I could just as well live happily as a rentee for the next 50 years for the same amount of money. I am 47 now, so even accounting for some raises of the rent I could live here for cheaper as a rentee until I die.
I will buy a property in 2026 nevertheless. But it will not be located as conveniently as my current flat. I will be able to buy a house for maybe 220k€, but it won’t be within the city center, like my current flat. But the new gf and her kid make an own house more desirable.
This landlord worshipping you Germans do will never cease to amaze me. Cheaper than buying? Guess why the prices are high. Rent for 50 years? You know what you’re left with after renting for 50 years? Absolutely nothing. And it’s not even like tenant rights are especially good here.
Again, the world is not black and white, only.
You know what you’re left with after renting for 50 years? Absolutely nothing.
Not really. If I don’t buy any real estate, I can afford to invest into other things. I could make monthly investments into a MSCI world ETF, for example. After a couple of decades I will have 0 debts and a lot of funds. And selling funds is easy and can be handled very flexibly (selling funds for amount x is trivial). If I buy real estate, by the time I retire I will have a house, worth 400.000€ or so and 200.000€ of debt or something along those lines. That might be better on balance, but it is a pain in the ass. You safe money on rent, but you pay interest instead.
And it’s not even like tenant rights are especially good here.
In Germany they are relatively good for tenants. Can’t complain. Rental contracts are typically indefinite. The landlord can also not raise my rent at will or get me out without a good reason and a very generous grace period. But on the other hand, I got a new gf and might need more space and some garden, etc. We will see. I have some considerations to do.
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From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
- some guy who doesn’t know much about “Real Communism”
Communism doesn’t argue people are all equal in abilities: but instead it argues that people’s needs should be met, regardless.
This doesn’t mean we all should live in the same identical brick huts, either. We just shouldn’t be so barbaric that we let people starve to death in a gutter, even if it’s because of their own failures.
Fistfight.
Or alternatively rock paper sizzers.my experiences with a multiflat building were the landlord lived on the property have been positive. However when they don’t is has been the worst. Apartment buildings have some regulations that flats don’t so if the person does not live there then its crap.
It wouldn’t need to.
