Reason I’m asking is because I have an aunt that owns like maybe 3 - 5 (not sure the exact amount) small townhouses around the city (well, when I say “city” think of like the areas around a city where theres no tall buildings, but only small 2-3 stories single family homes in the neighborhood) and have these houses up for rent, and honestly, my aunt and her husband doesn’t seem like a terrible people. They still work a normal job, and have to pay taxes like everyone else have to. They still have their own debts to pay. I’m not sure exactly how, but my parents say they did a combination of saving up money and taking loans from banks to be able to buy these properties, fix them, then put them up for rent. They don’t overcharge, and usually charge slightly below the market to retain tenants, and fix things (or hire people to fix things) when their tenants request them.

I mean, they are just trying to survive in this capitalistic world. They wanna save up for retirement, and fund their kids to college, and leave something for their kids, so they have less of stress in life. I don’t see them as bad people. I mean, its not like they own multiple apartment buildings, or doing excessive wealth hoarding.

Do leftists mean people like my aunt too? Or are they an exception to the “landlords are bad” sentinment?

  • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workEnglish
    2·
    13 days ago

    It’s not emotional reasoning. The rental income that a landlord collects is not a wage based on any labor that they do. It is a dividend on a real estate investment. The crucial mechanism to a rental property investment is the license to withhold or take away housing from people. That’s what makes landlordism extractive and parasitic. Landlords simply do not provide housing. They capture it and extort people for temporary permission to live in it.

    If you want some emotional reasoning as to why people resent landlords, here’s a short list I wrote from a similar thread:

    • Almost everyone has had or knows someone who’s had to deal with an especially neglectful or difficult landlord;
    • landlords have been engaging in notoriously greedy and abusive behavior since the industrial revolution;
    • landlords aren’t doing themselves any favors they way some of them publicly brag and whine about being landlords;
    • and there’s just something that isn’t right about owning someone else’s home and probably everyone has some faint sense of that.
    • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      12 days ago

      You skipped the most important question, as all anti-landlord idealists do.

      • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workEnglish
        11·
        12 days ago

        “How is house made?” You think landlords are necessary or helpful to housing production? How can that be if they are fundamentally parasitic?

        • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          12 days ago

          Now you’re making faces and trying to discredit the most important question so you can avoid answering it. It won’t work.

          • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workEnglish
            11·
            12 days ago

            The answer, which should be obvious, is that workers produce housing. How do you insert landlords into that process in a way that isn’t parasitic?

                • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  1·
                  12 days ago

                  Clearly you don’t have a solution for bringing housing into being except an utterly dangling magical notion that “workers will create it” with no answers to where, out of what, and while eating what.

                  You just keep calling different economic actors “parasites” without describing exactly what it is you think they are feeding on which could stand on its own.

                  You can smear paid employment, land ownership, and property ownership all you want but these are pretty big features in our economy and unless you have something better to answer with, sweeping them away does nothing.

                  So try replying in an affirmative mode where you don’t just call something parasitic but describe how you really think it will work, and be a little more thorough than just one microscopic part of it. Because my dude, workers create housing today.

                  • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workEnglish
                    11·
                    12 days ago

                    You won’t understand the solution until you understand the problem. I’ve already explained to you how landlords are parasitic. For similar reasons so are employers and land owners. The wealth they accumulate as owners of private property is not from any labor that they do themselves, but rather the labor of workers. To be clear, I’m not using the term parasitic pejoratively. I’m just being objective. Yes, workers produce housing today because that is how housing is produced, but landlords and their ilk are just overhead to housing production. If you still don’t understand, then please explain why you think that landlords are indispensable.