No Stupid Questions

I think if you rent out your attic, whatever, i don't think anybody cares. If you have a spare airbnb property or an investment property or you own an apartment complex, then yes, they're part of the problem.

My biggest gripe is the system. I am deemed not financially able to own a mortgage but I am deemed able to pay nearly double to pay off someone else's mortgage.

Yes I am bitter and I don't see why someone should be able to make money off me like this.

Those buying up properties which prevent people from getting on the property ladder, not owning a couple. I'm left-wing; I bought land, built a small house (small as in the size of a one-bed apartment), current rent it out which pays for my rent in another place. The landlords I've had over the past few years have been great, they are also living in the same place they rent out, those people are good.

Let’s say the city proposes a bill to build public housing apartments next to your aunt’s houses. This will guarantee reducing the rent and potential tenants your aunt collects. Now, because your aunt took so much loan from the bank and can’t pay it back, they will have to foreclose on the houses. Do they vote against the bill? You bet your ass they will.

both are parasites.

What's with this black and white mentality? They're absolutely leaches, but that doesn't fully define then. They are probably other things as well, that are hopefully good.

Depends on the person. There are people that mean every landlord. Their reasoning isn't as bad as you might think either. The main issues are that they still exert control over property, a form of private governance; they're denying the same financial stability through housing equity to another family; and they can artificially raise the price of housing.

That happens at every level of being a landlord. Of course the systemic problems only get worse as the number of owned or managed units goes up.

Most people are thinking about the giant corporations holding thousands of units.

I would say your aunt sounds like she found a way to try and make a living. You can certainly take issue with the system but she didn't make it. She sounds decent and not unlike my parents who bought some apartments in the early 2000s. What apparently people somehow don't realize, is that when you're not a corporation or running rental property like a huge dickhead, it's actually a lot of work to either pay others to do or to do yourself. The situation my parents were in was the bluest of collar jobs.

My mom cleaning toilets and filthy refrigerators, my dad dropping everything or getting out of bed to go fix someone's heat. This image that apparently 80% of commenters here have that they're just laying back collecting easy money couldn't have been further from the truth. They were working their ass off to make any money because they couldn't afford to hire most tasks.

They rented to people for under the market rate, they let old people stay over a year without paying. They drove significant drives to pick up rent checks from weirdos who couldn't handle mailing payments for some reason. The horror stories of how people abused their kindness and trashed their apartments are endless. SO many difficult tenants, and hundreds of thousands of back breaking hours later, they sold the apartments and made a little money. I will easily retire with more money than they made by writing software from the comfort of my home. Next to my parents' struggle with this, my life is incredibly easy.

But somehow, to a lot of lemmings, my work is honest and my parents are exploitative leeches who are morally bankrupt for their choice to take all that shit on (btw we have said nothing about the risk of enormous unexpected expenses or things like being sued by a tenant faking an injury and arguing in court it was your fault).

Is your aunt a parasite? sounds like she absolutely isn't. I'd say anyone willing to read what you wrote here and say she is, is probably an out of touch asshole whose opinion shouldn't be valued. But that may just be because I have the 20 years of watching my parents struggle to do that job and it wasn't easy for them except those few elusive weeks a year that somehow no apartments had anything break and no one moved. That entire 20 years they were afraid to even go on vacation because someone might have a water heater stop working or something.

Of course many would say "why wouldn't they just hire those maintenance items taken care of?!" I mean yeah of course, and I wasn't privy to their financial details all those years but it always sounded like they were only able to make money because they did most everything themselves. My parents were the ones exploited. By tenants being shitty and taking advantage sometimes, by the sellers, but most of all, by capitalism. They had to trade their lives for money, and nothing about it was easy. Anyone looking at the situation and unable to see that it was hard just honestly has no empathy at all.

This thread was a disappointing read. I have seen the spectrum, and corporate fuckhead landlords are complete scum. Honest, hardworking people who treat their tenants well are NOT, and anyone who tries to erase that nuance just wants to feel superior and probably should seek therapy (even more so than your average person -- we all need it).

Owning houses you don't live in is bullshit

I actually have a related question that I'm curious to hear takes on. I'm a leftist, and I own a 1-bed apartment where two good friends of mine rent the apartment right next door. Their landlord is planning to sell next year, and they don't have the ability to buy it. So depending on who does buy the place, my friends could be out of a home. My sister and I could combine finances to buy their unit (with a mortgage), and ensure that my friends could stay where they are. This would be a bit of a financial burden but doable, and we would need to charge rent to pay back the mortgage.

Would this be a net good or a net evil? I feel very conflicted about potentially being a landlord (especially for friends) but also don't want them to need to move.

We mean all of them. Being a landlord is racketeering other people's hard earned money for the human right of being housed, they're all parasites that grabbed the housing market to a point nobody else can buy anything to actually live in.

Are they renting out for as cheap as they can afford? Modest profit aside is fair.

If they're like "oh wow. I can raise from 1800$/mo to 2500$/mo bc everyone else is". That's where it's concerning.

Personally, if I was in their shoes, I would interview and find a struggling family and subsidize their rent from the other tenants for two of the 5 houses for as long as I could afford to.

(I own nothing right now, it's looking bleak)

Your Aunt should be paying enough taxes that owning a second property should be more or less unfeasible.

A fair system would have her seeking other retirement vehicles.

The problem in Ireland is when big American moguls go and buy up properties in Dublin to rent out en masse, effectively just sucking money out of the country. We always need people to lend out property on rent free cheaper than a mortgage. Landlords are vital for those who cannot afford a mortgage. But these landlords are the smaller ones - like your aunt.

Ideally as well economically, the tenants should be people who are starting off or not intending to live permanently - like holidaymakers or students

So as always, it depends and there is a spectrum. The scum of the scum are slum lords, i.e. landlords who buy property, do not fix up or maintain it, fill it with any old tenant that is desperate enough to take it, will evict someone at the drop of a hat, and constantly charge exorbitant amounts on property the own outright because the property value went up this year. It doesn't necessarily have to be that bad, but people that buy property simply as an "investment", i.e. get passive income from people with less money than them to buy property, are leeching off the less fortunate. There are certainly scales of badness to that, but that idea is simply immoral.

But there are other situations where one may be a "landlord" and it's not really a moral problem. For example, a cousin of mine had to work overseas for a bit over a year and was put up in a hotel during that time. He didn't want to sell his home, as he would be returning to it later, but also didn't want it to sit empty. He ended up signing a year long lease over to a couple students, charged them little more than the mortgage (enough to cover the mortgage, taxes and any minor repairs that may be needed after they left) and returned home to a house that was still in decent shape, hadn't had any break ins, infestations, or damage from the elements, and the students got some inexpensive housing for the year. No one was taken advantage of and he wasn't just milking poor people for profit. Everyone won. That is clearly different.

Meta commentary: note that "LEFTISTS" are not this bloc that is perfectly aligned. You need to ask the individuals whether they hate small scale as well as large scale landlords.

There is no universal "LEFTIST" belief. People exist at every point along the spectrum. Stop thinking in binary terms and you can have far more productive discussions with people.

My dad was a 'landlord' renting out the other three rooms of the house to people. He kept the rent a few hundred bwlow the market because all the rent money was icing on his cake, and he knew housing was hard to come by. Most renters liked him, but he was a poor judge of character and would often give the room to the first person that showed up, leading to drama, but mostly a good experience.

Both. A better statement would be "Landlords and real estate investors" are parasites. If you can afford a home you don't live in them you are driving up prices on homes that others could live in, fuck you.

It would vary depending on who's saying it.

There are lots of kinds of “leftisms” with lots of different attitudes toward landlords—but to take Georgism as a concrete example that exclusively focuses on land ownership:

Georgists would say that the portion of the rent equal to the market rent of the unimproved lot—including the value generated by the presence of the surrounding community and infrastructure—should go back to the community rather than the landlord, but the portion of the rent contributed solely by the presence of buildings and other improvements should go to the owner of the improvements.