If you pay 1% for one house, someone with 2 houses should pay 2%, and a company with 2000 homes should pay 2000%
That would make it increasingly difficult for mega companies to buy up everything and torture the housing market
If you pay 1% for one house, someone with 2 houses should pay 2%, and a company with 2000 homes should pay 2000%
That would make it increasingly difficult for mega companies to buy up everything and torture the housing market
That was a kind of aggressive way for me to express that, but, in all seriousness, the reason is that:
Being a “landlord”, that is, very specifically, an “owner of houses you don’t live in, but rent to people for profit”, is a way to live that is inherently abusive to the people you rent to.
You have ownership of a basic good people need to survive (housing), which is effectively scarce (because it’s not allowed for just anyone to build a house without incredible amounts of money, even homelessness is fairly illegal in many places), and you say to people:
“Either give me a monthly fee for me to allow you to have a roof over your head, or I’m calling the police (the only people allowed to be violent in the country) to kick you out”
It’s a way of making money, where the owner doesn’t do anything helpful to society, except find people who are desperate to survive, and milk them of what they make.
How is it not helpful to society to allow others to live in your house? And it’s not landlords who are looking for tenants, it’s the other way round.
There’s a reason “rent seeking” is a derogatory term.
The problem is being a landlord as a job. The problem is rich people buying up housing (or land and building on it) they don’t use, in order to rent for profit.
It’s about everyone who has no house. All the people who have no alternative, apart from renting from some rich people.
If someone “allowed” others to live in his house, without demanding half their salary, you wouldn’t see me complaining.
And the reason that buying or building a house is so expensive, is explicitly because rich people clamber over each other, to make the best investment of their lives: Housing.
People have a right to invest.
We’re saying that maybe, just maybe, basic human necessities shouldn’t be the object of speculation.
Agreed but we shouldn’t prevent people from buying or selling houses.
Nobody’s saying that.
We should however prevent the hoarding of residential buildings
Housing can be affordable or an investment, not both.
People can invest elsewhere, in markets not necessary for survival.
That’s like saying people with major medical issues “are looking for” insurance salespeople to fix their medical issues. They “need” insurance because the system is fucked, not because insurance will make them better. Likewise, no one “looks for” a landlord, they look for housing they can afford.
Yes but housing is much more expensive than healthcare. The government can’t afford to provide it for free.
You mean the taxpayers can’t afford it, and you’re wrong. Trillionaires exist, we could afford anything we want to if we had people in charge willing to tax them fairly.
Regardless, the potential cost difference doesn’t negate my previous point, no one has ever “looked for a landlord”.
No, what the government actually can’t afford is to have homeless people overutilizing public services (ambulances, police, hospitals, and jails) because they don’t have stable housing. It’s way, wayyy cheaper to provide people free housing than let them be homeless, Finland has proved this with basic arithmetic, our culture is just really into performative cruelty for some reason.