Landlords should have to pay income tax on their rental properties regardless of whether they're rented out or not. ( gothamist.com )

booty , 10 months ago

Landlords should not exist in the first place. When fantasizing, why aim for mediocrity?

SwingingKoala , 10 months ago

Who should build housing then?

Froyn , 10 months ago

Generally speaking, construction workers were found to be better at building houses than landlords.

ATQ , 10 months ago

And do the construction workers build housing for free? Or do they deserve to be paid?

Wookie , 10 months ago

Who even said they don’t deserve to be paid? Also, construction workers are typically paid by the construction company or contractor.

Landlords should not exist

BraveSirZaphod , 10 months ago

And who's paying the construction company or contractor?

Like, if you want to advocate for the abolition of private property ownership, that's fine, and it's a model that has actually worked halfway decently in some countries (though the lifetime leases aren't necessarily that functionally different than ownership). But just own up to what you're actually proposing and state that you think the government should own all property.

ghost_of_faso2 , 10 months ago

state that you think the government should own all property.

and who do you think composes the government?

elected represenatives.

sugar_in_your_tea , 10 months ago

Or in other words, the government becomes the landlord. If you’re not allowed to transfer ownership to someone else, you don’t own it.

flipht , 10 months ago

https://eyeonhousing.org/2023/02/age-of-housing-stock-by-state-4/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20latest%20data,an%20important%20remodeling%20market%20indicator.

The vast majority of the US's housing stock has been paid off. Every time a residential property changes hands, the bank gets to re-collect all of their fees for...what, exactly? Making money available? They only do that because they're underwritten by the federal government, subsidized by taxes.

So why don't we just give direct loans to people, and subsidize those who need it directly instead of funneling the money through dozens of greedy hands taking percentages off the top?

ATQ , 10 months ago

I’m not even sure why I’d respond to someone as intellectually dishonest as you. But if you want to live in a shelter, your shelter has to be paid for. If you can’t pay for the full construction costs yourself then you have to get a loan and the bank gets paid. If you can’t get a loan, then you have to pay someone that can get a loan and that person gets paid. This isn’t a hard concept.

If you’d like to argue that the state should provide a minimum shelter for every individual, then that’s a interesting conversation that we can have. But a simple “landlords shouldn’t exist” is an unbelievably ignorant position held only by children and morons. Because even if a “the state provides shelter” scenario it’s the state that is your landlord.

DessertStorms , 10 months ago

But if you want to live in a shelter, your shelter has to be paid for.

no, because housing is a human right, and the fact that you want to live in a society where someone has commodified your right to survive to this degree, is as pathetic as it is terrifying.

ATQ , 10 months ago

If you don’t think that housing has to be paid for, via any number of reasonable means, then you’re explicitly arguing that you deserve the labor of others. That’s called stealing. And slavery.

If you want to have a reasonable conversation, tell us how you think the workers that produce the materials and build the housing should be paid. The only pathetic thing is when people refuse to answer this question.

bedrooms , 10 months ago

That’s called stealing. And slavery.

Why did you choose to resort to false equivalence? You sounded like you had a point worth discussing until you pulled out this trick.

wizardbeard , 10 months ago

Regardless of housing being a human right, the space used has to exist, materials have to be used to make or upkeep the structure, and it has to be prevented from decaying to the point it can no longer be habitable.

Building and upkeeping these spaces requires expenditure of resources (building materials, time, work effort). Where is that supposed to come from? Whatever source for these resources exists has to get them from somewhere, and if you don’t expect to have to help upkeep their ability to provide these resources over time, someone else would have to.

There’s no way to magic these resources out of thin air. Even without the grim specter of Capitalism, the wood and nails have to come from somewhere, and someone has to put it together. Someone has to keep it from falling apart.

Any further discussion boils down to: Do you accept the responsibility of contributing your fair share, or do you expect someone else to subsidize your fair share in some way to make up for what you can’t or won’t contribute?

I’m not making any judgement one way or the other, just saying that there is no social/political system in which you can make something out of nothing. Some people are going to over simplify that, but it’s a valid question. Where are these things supposed to come from when someone can’t provide it for themselves? Who should be made responsible?

I don’t have the answers, but calling the expectation that others provide it for you “stealing or slavery” isn’t an absolutely absurd leap.

flipht , 10 months ago

The construction workers got paid within a short time of the house being built. The developer got most of the money, and the bank continues to collect on the property for decades. The value of most of the US's housing stock was paid for years ago, and now we are all just paying for financial shell games to enrich the already rich.

sharedburdens , 10 months ago

Housing can get built without the professional middlemen involved, believe it or not.

SwingingKoala , 10 months ago

And who pays for it and owns it?

sharedburdens , 10 months ago

People, collectively.

Ideally all the shitheads obsessed with “owning” get removed from the equation

JasSmith , 10 months ago

People, collectively.

But they're free to do that right now and it doesn't happen. Not on the scale we require. Asking people to donate their time to build houses just isn't a scalable solution in modern society.

archomrade , 10 months ago

modern society.

You misspelled capitalist

TonyTonyChopper , 10 months ago

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sharedburdens , 10 months ago

got something wrong with pronouns?

TonyTonyChopper , 10 months ago

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sharedburdens , 10 months ago

Lol are you gonna call me “woke” next

SexMachineStalin , 10 months ago

:PIGPOOPBALLS: :gulag:

HornyOnMain , 10 months ago

Transphobes gtfo

maduro-katana-1hexbear-trans

silent_water , 10 months ago

what’s wrong with you

mino , 10 months ago

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sharedburdens , 10 months ago

Communism brought Russia from a feudal industrial backwater to putting the first people in space in the span like 20-30 years, and they crushed the Nazi war machine in the process.

mino , 10 months ago

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sharedburdens , 10 months ago

Literally every other western country had some sort of nonaggression pact with the Nazis in that time period, Stalin wanted to send a million men to Czechoslovakia to stop Hitler there but the allies said no.

Communist governance is responsible for dramatically increasing living standards of people across the world. A clever trick that capitalists like to do is pretend that all the work done by the CPC in the last few decades has actually been done by capitalism!

SunriseParabellum , 10 months ago

Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had a pact with each other

The pact that was formed after France and England failed to enter into an anti-Nazi pact with the USSR?

SootyChimney , 10 months ago

A pact that was a necessity when all the Allies rebuffed the USSR, but also a pact that documents show the USSR never even intended to honour from day one.

SunriseParabellum , 10 months ago

It’s pretty clear the Soviets expected Germany to violate the pact, they wouldn’t have bothered building a massive fucking defensive line between them and Germany if they hadn’t.

Tankiedesantski , 10 months ago

Poland was invaded by both the Soviet Union and Germany.

The USSR entered Poland after it was clear the Polish army was collapsing. The alternative was to let the Nazis occupy the whole thing. Britain and France went to war with Germany to preserve Polish independence. If they thought the USSR was just as bad as the Nazis, why didn’t they also declare war on the Soviets in 1939?

AssortedBiscuits , 10 months ago

Poland was invaded by both the Soviet Union

More like the Soviet Union liberated Polish-occupied Belarus and Ukraine after Poland stole Belarusian and Ukrainian land during the early 1920s. Or are you one of those Polish ultranationalists seething that Lviv is a Ukrainian city instead of a Polish one?

polskilumalo , 10 months ago

My grandmother would be dead or germanified and we would probably be speaking german if not for the Soviet Union.

They saved Poland dumbass.

Tankiedesantski , 10 months ago

Go and have a look at Russia to see how how this communist/socialist mindset worked out for them.

With an 89% home ownership rate? Yeah, damn, it would really suck for 9/10 people to live in a home that they own.

Almost all the top countries on that list are socialist or were socialist until the 90s. It’s almost as if socialism actually results in homes being treated as basic needs for people instead of commodities for landlords to make money off of.

Grimble , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

NPC talk. Youre just spouting lines

Tankiedesantski , 10 months ago

I uses to be a bourgeois land owner, but then I took an arrow to the knee.

Did you see that poor person? Filthy creatures.

HellAwaits , 10 months ago

Let me guess, it was also Venezuela’s fault too?

People like you are all NPCs.

BraveSirZaphod , 10 months ago

This is a very sudden jump from "housing shouldn't be so expensive", which essentially everyone agrees with, to "we should abolish private property", which you'll find is a significantly less popular proposal.

SoylentBlake , 10 months ago

Let’s start with pretty much the entirety of millenials and gen z that would love to own a home.

I mean, then there’s the homeless.

uniqueid198x , 10 months ago

Heres one of the largest housing developments in new york: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-op_City,_Bronx

Grimble , 10 months ago

Not landlords, because we’re imagining a different society than the single model in your aphantasia afflicted head, believe it or not

SunriseParabellum , 10 months ago

How to libraries, public schools, and roads get build?

Honytawk , 10 months ago

The people living in them usually.

bedrooms , 10 months ago

Right? I think it's weird. If nobody pays the house, they just don't build more house, I guess.

tracyspcy , 10 months ago

Landlords do not build houses, they just rent them out. Housing, shelter call it whatever you like is human right and essential need, so it should not be a part of speculations for profits. Now you can see overpriced real estate because of investors who buy it and never live there. All this “helpers” who rent out their apartments bring more harm than benefit for society (they at least contribute to a price growth in real estate). Buildings could be constructed by government owned organizations in order to provide society with housing, no need in speculators to solve problems.

SwingingKoala , 10 months ago

Buildings could be constructed by government owned organizations

Ok, so you want the government to be the landlord as you have more trust in a government monopoly than in a market. Fair. Just not something I agree with.

tracyspcy , 10 months ago

depends on problem you are going to solve, if you want to provide people with affordable housing, then challenge your beliefs in almighty market.

JasSmith , 10 months ago

While he's doing that, perhaps you could challenge your belief in the efficacy of big government. Countries which prevent markets from operating efficiently tend to do really poorly over time. The more authoritarian, the worse they perform.

I think the solution lies somewhere between government and markets.

tracyspcy , 10 months ago

hehe considering market propaganda in education, on every media it is hard for me to not challenge my “belief” on a daily basis.

unfortunately in your comment you repeating neoliberal propaganda, please check guardian article on “free market zone libertarian experiment” tldr it led to low wage sweatshops and workers repression (and spoiler even this libertarian experiment relied on governmental support)

JasSmith , 10 months ago

I argued that the solution is both, not one or the other. You provided me an example of an extreme in the other direction. I also think libertarianism and anarchy does not work. Please re-read my comment.

I think the solution lies somewhere between government and markets.

tracyspcy , 10 months ago

Countries which prevent markets from operating efficiently tend to do really poorly over time. The more authoritarian, the worse they perform.

In general it means less government control over the markets. And less means libertarian concept (see article again). If you mean something in between , there is need in very detailed scale to find difference between current regulated markets, non regulated markets (libertarian nonsense) and balance that you want.

archomrade , 10 months ago

You’re really going to have to define your metrics for “tend to do really poorly over time”.

sugar_in_your_tea , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

libertarianism… does not work

I get the point about anarchy (power vacuum arguments apply across implementations), but libertarianism is such a huge category that I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Libertarianism isn’t an economic system, there are socialist and capitalist extremes. It’s also not a government structure, it houses both anarchists and bigger government ideas.

It’s a philosophy that values the principles of individual liberty and non-aggression first and foremost, and everything else is discussed on those terms (I.e. how can we solve the problem with more liberty). There are different views about property rights, validity of certain types of taxes, etc, so you usually can’t generalize unless you believe we need authoritarianism or something.

If you could be more specific, we could probably have a constructive conversation.

Flyberius , 10 months ago

Ok, so you want the government to be the landlord as you have more trust in a government monopoly than in a market.

Yup. Basically. Although it is worth noting that the type of government we currently have, beholden to capital, is not trustworthy. Their priorities first and foremost are to serving corporate interests, which is probably why you trust them so little. Any power or public capital they are entrusted with gets pumped into private companies whose sole purpose is to make as much profit as possible for as little expenditure.

Any government brave enough to outlaw private landlords is going to have much more socially oriented priorities and will be much more inclined to serve the public good rather than the almighty market.

DessertStorms , 10 months ago

Ok, so you want the government to be the landlord as you have more trust in a government monopoly than in a market. Fair. Just not something I agree with.

ok, so you want a society where people, yourself included (though I have a feeling you like to pretend otherwise), can end up homeless and destitute because.. They don't have enough of this imaginary thing some people made up so they could centralise their power and commodify the existence of the rest of us for profit, so they deserve to be left for dead, and that is something you agree with..

In other words - you're oblivious scum

SwingingKoala , 10 months ago

In other words - you’re oblivious scum

I’m not American. You’re obviously a hateful prejudiced asshole.

SunriseParabellum , 10 months ago

so you want the government to be the landlord

Is this government controlled by the bourgeois or the proletariat class? If I can’t afford to buy a home (and even then, unless I’m rich enough to buy with cash I’m going to be beholden to the bank I get the loan from) I’m going to have to rent from the bourgeois class no matter what under capitalism, I just get a choice in which member of the bourgeois I get to rent from, they’re gonna be taking my money regardless. If the working class is in control of the state I actually get a say in who’s running the housing authority in my city, I can vote and advocate for housing policies I like, potentially I can make housing totally free, or at least cheap as dirt, cuz it’s not being run as part of the profit motive anymore, which is good for me as a renter. Or I can promote policies where the state build housing for people to own, Cuba for example has one of the highest home ownership rates in the world because the government funds the construction of very cheap housing that people basically “rent to own”.

panopticon , 10 months ago

Fair.

If we, the workers, are the ones running that government monopoly and not an oligopoly of landlords and other speculators then yes, that would be more fair. It’s also a vastly more efficient way to guarantee that everyone is housed, as history shows

BraveSirZaphod , 10 months ago

Food is also an essential need, but it absolutely has a massive profit-driven market around it that generally works. I'd argue that there are specific flaws in the housing market that can and should be addressed, not that the very concept of having a housing market is inherently flawed.

tracyspcy , 10 months ago

for sure, there are many essential needs beyond housing and food. I cannot agree that it works well with food either, starving still exist even in “developed” countries. It looks you are trying to a patch something that really flawed. Unfortunately it is not a way. We should move away from profit oriented society and away from human exploitation.

sugar_in_your_tea , 10 months ago

You’d just swap profit for influence instead. Look at the USSR, they had issues feeding their population, yet the people in power largely got whatever they wanted.

See the famous trip Boris Yeltsin took to a Texas grocery store. At least in those days, capitalism handily beat communism in providing a variety of foods to the average person.

So the profit motive certainly has some benefits. It also has downsides, such as unequal Income distribution. But then, existing examples of communism/socialism also have similar problems.

So I think the discussion about economic system misses the mark. We can regulate capitalism to provide many of the benefits we want, so the discussion should be on what we actually want and what changes we need to make to get there. For housing, we could solve the problems we see in a number of ways, each with downsides, such as:

• subsidize renting
• increase property taxes to reduce vacancy
• add a vacancy tax - probably harder to enforce
• build more public housing - I haven’t been impressed with section 8 housing, so I’m not bullish on this one
• rent controls - seems to backfire more than help because it removes the profit motive to improve rentals

And so on. Switching the economic model comes with huge costs and I’m not convinced it’s actually better than fixing what we have.

tracyspcy , 10 months ago

You’d just swap profit for influence instead. Look at the USSR, they had issues feeding their population, yet the people in power largely got whatever they wanted. See the famous trip Boris Yeltsin took to a Texas grocery store. At least in those days, capitalism handily beat communism in providing a variety of foods to the average person.

I cannot accept your argument since variety of brands for similar product in the store doesn’t mean society can feed itself. It is wrong angle to see on the object. Since there is various of factors which could easily destroy such logic from quality of food to affordability (simple a lot of product in store, but people cannot buy it). Much better metric is satisfying the need, in our case in food. So in our case we should look at calories consumption and nutritional value. Look at cia document where conclusion is “American and Soviet citizens eat about the same amount of food each day but the Soviet diet may be more nutritious”.

BraveSirZaphod , 10 months ago

so the discussion should be on what we actually want and what changes we need to make to get there

Come now, that's far less entertaining than tribalistic shitfling on the Internet, and isn't that the real objective here?

Joking aside, a big solution that should absolutely be on that list is abolition of single-family zoning and a general reduction in the amount of red tape involved in building more housing. There are, and I am not kidding, multiple examples of middle-density housing being blocked because some local NIMBYs tried to have a laundromat protected as a historical landmark. In California, endless demands for environmental reviews can be weaponized such that the legal fees and wasted time make the financials for new housing fall through. And that's even assuming you can find land that isn't exclusively zoned for single-family homes. San Francisco has one of the worst housing markets in the country, and despite that, on 38% of its land, it is illegal to build housing that isn't single family homes. At the end of the day, if you have a million people looking for housing and only a third as many units available, you can either build more, or you can accept that only the richest third of them will get housing. One of those options is much more enticing if you're claiming to care about the poor.

sugar_in_your_tea , 10 months ago

abolition of single-family zoning

I disagree, we should just make it less attractive. This can happen in a few ways:

• improve mass transit, and encourage higher density along transit arteries
• make vehicular traffic less convenient by routing it around city centers instead of through - i.e. encourages mass transit use
• increase property tax and reduce sales tax - basically encourage using less space and using more services (i.e. rely on the local shop, not your own food storage room)

And so on. The benefits here are varied, such as:

• less traffic in city centers
• more green space, since the space isn’t occupied by as many SFH
• less road maintenance because you need fewer roads
• healthier people since using a bicycle or walking would be more convenient than driving

But as you noted, the above gets blocked by NIMBYs. But it is possible, as we can see in the Netherlands, which has largely reduced its vehicular traffic and improved the residential density. It wasn’t always that way, but they made a big push for it and people now don’t want to go back.

BraveSirZaphod , 10 months ago

I totally agree that those are all good things, but I still see no real reason why the government has any business telling a homeowner who wants to split the building into a duplex that it's illegal, because reasons.

The political cost of actually abolishing SF zoning is definitely high though, and proposals to make SF homes less attractive are definitely more politically palatable.

sugar_in_your_tea , 10 months ago

Yup, it’s really dumb. SF should have virtually no SFH-exclusive zoning since they’re very much space constrained, they should have a lot more mixed zoning (i.e. shops at ground level, housing above).

SoylentBlake , 10 months ago

Food also enjoys massive amounts of competition amongst what type of food to eat. Housing doesn’t.

At least here in the states unprepared food isn’t taxed either.

Should more be done to get food to the needy? Absolutely. Should we allow unfettered accumulation of private property (every domicile beyond your residence) at the behest of personal property (your residence)? I don’t think so.

Let people own more than one home; after everyone has one.

Otherwise it’s just cruelty as a feature of society, not a flaw. And I in good conscience can’t get behind that

BraveSirZaphod , 10 months ago

Food also enjoys massive amounts of competition amongst what type of food to eat. Housing doesn’t.

You're actually on to something here. There is far far far more food produced than we could ever consume; so much that a massive amount is literally thrown away. Whereas with housing, we've been grossly underbuilding for decades now. If, in a year, you have 25,000 people who want to move to your city, but you've only added 2000 units of housing, then the inevitable result is that the richest 2000 people get the housing, and the owners of that housing can charge extremely high prices. Given this, why the hell is it literally illegal in most of the land in our cities to build anything other than a detached single family home that might house four or five people, as opposed to a duplex or small apartment building that could house two or three times as many?

I'm not saying that we shouldn't tweak around with the allocation incentives, but there's simply no where to policy your way around the fact that our urban areas have far too little housing for the amount of people who want to live there.

Washburn , 10 months ago

The same crews who do now 🤨

I never saw a landlord or developer do any work to prepare an area or build anything on any of the jobsites I was on.

BraveSirZaphod , 10 months ago

And who paid those crews?

Olgratin_Magmatoe , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

The renters, ultimately. Landlords are just middle men who need to be cut out of the equation through a land tax system and massive investments in housing development, zoning fixes, and market rate housing/co-ops.

The only “job” landlords have is owning, which isn’t a job and adds nothing. They are a burden and inefficiency of the economy, and a burden on people.

bluGill , 10 months ago

There is value in someone figuring out all the finance mess so that when someone wants a place to live it exists. I.know how to build a house (I was in construction in my younger days). I don't want to spent 200 days of my life building a house, I just want a place to live.

Olgratin_Magmatoe , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

There is value in someone figuring out all the finance mess so that when someone wants a place to live it exists.

That’s the job of a manager, which isn’t what a landlord generally does. And even on the rare times when a landlord actually does do some financial management, it takes up a minority of the time.

I don’t want to spent 200 days of my life building a house, I just want a place to live.

I would like to do so at some point, and I don’t blame you for not wanting to do so. But housing needs to be affordable and it isn’t.

BraveSirZaphod , 10 months ago

I actually agree with a lot of those proposals, but property ownership still comes with a level of long-term required investment that many people simply do not want and cannot afford. You could vaporize every landlord in New York City today, and the housing would still be incredibly valuable and far more expensive than most people could afford. I live here myself, and while I do hope to own some day, that's simply not financially feasible for me right now. People like me need to rent, and thus we need to rent from somebody. I only moved here a year ago, and I'm quite happy to have not had to combine all the hassle of moving with the added pressure of purchasing an asset that will tie up my net worth for a good few decades.

I can see some merit to systems like China or Singapore where land is leased directly from the government rather than private landlords (and arguably, given the existence of land and property taxes, it's a nominal distinction really), but still, you've got the existence of an intermediate owner that performs maintenance and searches for tenants, with the bonus and curse that that intermediate has no profit motive to actually perform that work.

Olgratin_Magmatoe , 10 months ago

but property ownership still comes with a level of long-term required investment that many people simply do not want and cannot afford.

That’s largely due to the lack of supply of housing. And that’s why I think the government should be absolutely spamming housing units. Even if we kept landlords, they’d have no leverage to keep rents sky high.

People like me need to rent, and thus we need to rent from somebody.

And I think that your choice for that somebody should be better than some rich fuck who owns half the city’s housing (mildly exaggerating).

you’ve got the existence of an intermediate owner that performs maintenance and searches for tenants, with the bonus and curse that that intermediate has no profit motive to actually perform that work.

The person who does that work doesn’t need to be the owner though.

BraveSirZaphod , 10 months ago

You know, so long as we can agree that lack of supply is the core issue, the rest of all that is really just details haha. I'm not hugely confident of public housing's track record in the US (though there's obviously a lot that went into that), but whether it's new public housing or just loosening zoning and allowing the market to actually meet demand, I don't really care so long as there are units.

Olgratin_Magmatoe , 10 months ago

You know, so long as we can agree that lack of supply is the core issue

It’s one of the core issues. I think there is a lot more baked into this, but if this is one of the things we can agree on then so be it.

I’m not hugely confident of public housing

While I do think public housing is a part of the solution, and has a lot of mistakes to learn from, I think co-ops should be the main workhorse/end goal for government built housing.

public housing or just loosening zoning and allowing the market to actually meet demand, I don’t really care so long as there are units.

I say, all of the above. Any possible way to increase the supply is a good thing.

booty , 10 months ago

Hmm yes, when I want a house built I call up a landlord, this is very logical behavior

ghost_of_faso2 , 10 months ago

70% of housing stock in the UK was built by the government in the 1970s

silent_water , 10 months ago

landlords don’t build housing

ATQ , 10 months ago

They pay for it to be built. Unless you think the workers should work for free and not receive any benefit from their labor. Does hexbear know you feel this way? 🤣

ghost_of_faso2 , 10 months ago

wait till you understand what ‘tax’ is

ATQ , 10 months ago

Oh, so you just want the state to be your landlord? Enjoy your cinderblock gulag.

ghost_of_faso2 , 10 months ago

https://lemmygrad.ml/pictrs/image/5ae3764c-1654-423c-ae89-990f28674b82.jpeg

hmmmm

ghost_of_faso2 , 10 months ago

hmmm

https://lemmygrad.ml/pictrs/image/f6045bba-0613-462b-8cb5-5d8d6b62aac3.png

panopticon , 10 months ago

Socialism is… When you own your own home??

spoileryes-sickoche-smile

Honytawk , 10 months ago

Yes, Socialism has home ownership.

The only thing that is state affiliated more than in Capitalism is the mean of production (businesses) being owned by the state. Everything else is still owned by individuals.

You are thinking of Communism.

silent_water , 10 months ago

it’s a play on "communism means no toothbrush*

bagend , 10 months ago

You’d also be able to own your own home under communism, to be clear.

polskilumalo , 10 months ago

A private domicile is not private property, so yes even under communism people will own thier own homes.

ATQ , 10 months ago

Western countries already provide resources for our less fortunate friends and neighbors. But we don’t use the police power of the state to force those resources on people that don’t want them. We also don’t round them up and force them to fight for our Moscovi overlords that are just a itsy-bitsy more equal than the rest of us. Hmmmm

ghost_of_faso2 , 10 months ago

In the west all of your children have the freedom to grow up as homeless crack heads living in tent cities, how inspiring.

ATQ , 10 months ago

😂🤣😂

Median US Household Income - $70,784

Median Moscovi Household Income -$27,634

Well shit, little Yuri, looks like a good deal for us.

ghost_of_faso2 , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

now compare the amount of homeless people in both, also you linked the same article twice

ATQ , 10 months ago

Homeless in the US - 0.2% of the population.

Homeless in Russia - 3.5% of the population.

Is this going the way you thought it would?

ghost_of_faso2 , 10 months ago

Where did I use modern day capitalist russia to prove my point again?

ATQ , 10 months ago

Haha. Ok !lemmygrad 😂🤣😂. Here’s your L. Have a nice day.

ghost_of_faso2 , 10 months ago

mfw countries where the median income is 10% of the USA’s can provide more housing for the people living in it, you are so cucked lmao

bagend , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Russia has a capitalist, pro-landlord economy, just like the US…

CARCOSA , 10 months ago

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ATQ , 10 months ago

The US murder rate (6.81) and Russia (6.80) are virtually identical. The suicide rates though…

US suicide rate - 14.04

Russia suicide rate - 21.6

No word on the window rate for each country.

Happiness index

US - 6.951

Russia - 5.477

Thordros , 10 months ago

I think it’s pretty hilarious that you assume everybody opposed to capitalism is Russian, and use that as a counter-example for why “communism” is failing today.

Did history stop for you in 1991 or something? The neoliberals won; Russia has been a hyper-capitalist abomination living in the corpse of the USSR for over three decades now. Why would we care that Russia sucks? Everybody knows it sucks now.

came_apart_at_Kmart , 10 months ago

“socialism is when you’re in russia. the more russia you are in, the more socialism is what’s wrong america #1 football hotdog toby keith.” - the diabetic gym teacher who taught this guy’s social studies class.

keepcarrot , 10 months ago

I’ve read and re-read this thread… Do you think Russia is currently communist? Like… Putin is a communist, the United Russia Party is communist etc etc. Is this actually your belief?

panopticon , 10 months ago

them up and force them to fight for our Moscovi overlords that are just a itsy-bitsy more equal than the rest of u

Nice whataboutism you tankie! Centrist liberal tankie!!!

Western countries already provide resources for our less fortunate friends and neighbors

Lol. Lmao even

ATQ , 10 months ago

It’s true. That’s why our homelessness incidence are less than 10% of yours. Maybe that’s why you’re trying to drive yours down by conscripting your homeless and forcing them into “former glory” wars?

captcha , 10 months ago

1. Do you just assume that everyone who disagrees with you is a Russian?
2. Did you forget Russia hasn’t been communist for over three decades?

ATQ , 10 months ago

I assume, accurately, that all you hexbears are Russian trolls, Hindu Nationalists, or various flavors of pudgey man children collectively known as college communists who want to seize the means of production from their parents that didn’t give them enough hugs. Which flavor are you? I bet it’s the last one 😂

silent_water , 10 months ago

racism to own the gommies. gottem

ATQ , 10 months ago

Lol. rACisM!!!1. Why don’t you just trot out the Hitler Card while you’re at it!

Here you go bro, I’ll give you that hug you’ve been desperately missing 🤗

AOCapitulator , 10 months ago

Hahahahahahahhahaha

You aren’t a real person, ‘opinion’ discarded

SunriseParabellum , 10 months ago

I can vote for who runs the state, I can’t vote for my landlord.

bagend , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

these pro-landlord tankies don’t believe in democracy smdh

ATQ , 10 months ago

You can rent from someone else. That’s actually easier than moving cities, states, or countries.

SunriseParabellum , 10 months ago

Can I rent from someone who isn’t a capitalist who’s charging me way more than the cost of upkeep for the property to make a profit? Also even if we have a housing market wouldn’t the option to live in public housing be good for less well off people to help drive down rents on the private housing market?

ATQ , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

If you want to argue that the government should develop low cost housing, that’s an interesting discussion. In general, “supply” regardless of how it’s created, is the answer to high housing prices. I do fear that you’ll be dissatisfied with the quality of that government housing.

SunriseParabellum , 10 months ago

I do fear that you’ll be dissatisfied with the quality of that government housing.

IDK Austria and a few other Euro nations seem to be pulling it off okay.

The_Jewish_Cuban , 10 months ago

No it’s not. That’s why you have houses and apartments for hypothetical millionaires going empty because no one can actually afford them. As long as homes and real estate have speculative value there is no guarantee that “supply” will positively affect prices or affect them enough to provide housing for everyone.

The simple fact that there are more empty homes and apartments than there are homeless people disproves your premise.

420blazeit69 , 10 months ago

If you own property the state is already your landlord.

Honytawk , 10 months ago

Well, then tell the government to come clean my gutter.

UlyssesT , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Oh, so you just want the state to be your landlord? Enjoy your cinderblock gulag.

bootlicker

uralsolo , 10 months ago

You know what’s worse than a cinderblock gulag? Homelessness.

Nicklybear , 10 months ago

As someone who has been homeless, I would MUCH rather live my entire life in a “cinderblock gulag” then spend even a second homeless. So, yes, if we ever were to get such buildings provided to us from the government, I would greatly enjoy them.

kneel_before_yakub , 10 months ago

Oh, you want capitalist housing? Enjoy your tent getting destroyed by cops.

Olgratin_Magmatoe , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Landlords don’t pay for buildings to get built, the renters ultimately do. Landlords are just middlemen.

ATQ , 10 months ago

Landlords pay up front (directly or via a loan, which the renters presumably cannot get) and assume the risk of vacancies and repairs. If landlords ceased to exist, how do you propose new housing stock be created? Should the government be your landlord?

Olgratin_Magmatoe , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Landlords pay up front (directly or via a loan, which the renters presumably cannot get) and assume the risk of vacancies and repairs.

And then they get bailed out by the government when their risk blows up.

wsj.com/…/landlords-were-never-meant-to-get-bailo…

consumerfinance.gov/…/four-reasons-landlords-shou…

And they have little to no risk in the first place because the market has such high demand that they can pretty much instantly fill vacancies, and they barely do repairs if at all. And at least where I live, renters are required to have/pay for renters insurance which further drives down the landlord’s risk.

If landlords ceased to exist, how do you propose new housing stock be created? Should the government be your landlord?

Government investment into housing development (which then turn into market rate housing/co-ops), zoning fixes, and a LVT is the solution. The builders get paid, home ownership becomes affordable, and renters aren’t being priced gouged. It would also do wonders to help fix the homelessness crisis.

And none of it needs the government to own your home.

h

ATQ , 10 months ago

Investment into housing development, zoning fixes, market rate housing, co-ops, and a LVT is the solution.

You can’t be serious? Let’s review.

Investment into housing development

By who…? Come on, be honest, who do you think is going to do this 🤣

zoning fixes

That allow who to build more housing?

market rate housing

Is literally what the West has right now.

Co-Ops

We have these now.

and a LVT

This is a fine step. Most states have property taxes now that include the land that a rental sits on.

If you can’t pay for your own housing, your choices are either for the government to pay for it, or for the private sector to pay for it. In either event the entity that owns your house, that isn’t you, is your landlord. If you can’t pay for your own housing, and you don’t want the private sector or the government to provide it for you, then you’re homeless.

Olgratin_Magmatoe , 10 months ago

By who…? Come on, be honest

It was implied, but I later edited my comment, the government should do so. We have a massive housing crisis on our hands and there needs to be a solution. The government is so bloated that there is easily already the money somewhere to divert to something actually worthwhile.

That allow who to build more housing?

Private developers, individual citizens, the government itself, etc. Anybody and everybody with a willingness to build a house should be able to do so without dealing with the ridiculous zoning laws we have now.

Is literally what the West has right now.

We have these now.

We have market-rate housing and co-ops at such a low rate. We need a massive increase in quantity. The private sector won’t do this because there is no profit motive, so it largely has to be the government who is building these. But once their built it shouldn’t be the government who owns it, it should be the co-ops, market-rate housing orgs, or literally individual citizens who own the housing,

Most states have property taxes now that include the land that a rental sits on.

I don’t want property taxes. Those need to be removed along with all other types of taxation. The only valid type of taxation should be land value tax, and a carbon emission tax. A property tax punishes a land owner for developing their land and using it more efficiently. A land value tax on the other hand incentivizes more effective use. It’s a massive topic and a massive difference. If you want to learn more I would recommend looking into georgism.

In either event the entity that owns your house, that isn’t you, is your landlord.

I disagree with your definition.

ATQ , 10 months ago

If you want to argue that it is a valid use of the state to produce low cost housing then this is an interesting conversation. But much of the rest of your response is nonsense. For instance -

I don’t want property taxes. Those need to be removed along with all other types of taxation. The only valid type of taxation should be land value tax, and a carbon emission tax.

You’re going to fund all the social programs of a modern government via, essentially, no taxes? Come on. If you want the government to provide a robust social safety net, including housing, you’ll be looking at Nordics level taxation.

I disagree with your definition.

You can be wrong if you want to be.

Olgratin_Magmatoe , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

You’re going to fund all the social programs of a modern government via, essentially, no taxes?

No, it would be funded through land value and carbon taxes. Those two tax types should be the only valid form of taxation. We should still have enough tax to pay for it (after we ditch the bloat our government has. Example).

If you want the government to provide a robust social safety net, including housing, you’ll be looking at Nordics level taxation.

People always complain about such a system but they actually have healthcare, so seems like a moot point to me.

You can be wrong if you want to be.

First off, there’s no need to be a dick about it. Second, that definition says person, whereas you said entity.

• “In either event the entity that owns your house, that isn’t you, is your landlord.”
• “a person who rents land, a building, or an apartment to a tenant.”

commiewithoutorgans , 10 months ago

Ah God, I was wondering (cheering for) when you’d make the turn to “politically only possible with a socialist government” or something along those lines, but now I see you’re one of the famed georgists. First I’ve seen in the wild!

Olgratin_Magmatoe , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

I see you’re one of the famed georgists. First I’ve seen in the wild!

If you have a criticism of georgism I’d love to hear it, because so far I’ve heard basically none. And I don’t think I would go quite so far as to call myself a georgist. It’s only something I learned about relatively recently, but the more I learn about it the better it sounds than the current dog shit we are dealing with that we somehow call a tax system. Is georgism perfect? Almost certainly not, but it’s a massive step in the right direction.

you’d make the turn to “politically only possible with a socialist government”

You are correct in that the solution to the housing crisis is only possible with a socialist government. Socialism and georgism are not mutually exclusive.

commiewithoutorgans , 10 months ago

Land is in common ownership + tax based on land distribution. What does this do? Georgism is only relevant to capitalism and is only a minor improvement to efficiency and distribution that will also just become calculated into costs within the C of the C+V equation from marx. It would only have a minor impact based on the size of your house+yard, nothing more. It’s in no way progressing us towards socialism. It could be useful for a NEP/current China situation of broadly capitalist relations controlled by a socialist state, I guess, and I’m open to that tax dominating, though it doesn’t really consider (or tries to theoretically consider but won’t ever be able to) imperialism/unequal exchange and extraction in other lands where the raw product is immediately exported to a country that will refine it.

Olgratin_Magmatoe , 10 months ago

Land is in common ownership

In some versions of socialism, not all. And technically in a georgist system, depending on implementation, all land is considered the governments land, it’s owned by the common people. From there individuals pay society for exclusivity to a plot.

It would only have a minor impact based on the size of your house+yard, nothing more. It’s in no way progressing us towards socialism.

I’m not an economist, so my understanding is limited, but my understanding is that a LVT results in the landlords themselves paying the tax instead of tennants. The end result is a giant hit to the wallets of landlords across the country. That’s a very good thing, and does indeed get us closer to socialism. Less landlords, less landlord power, the better.

Additionally, even if it only slightly effects land use efficiency (which I disagree that it would be slight) any increase in efficiency will increase the proportion of land that is for sale and therefore reduce prices.

And keep in mind, this is only part of the solution, not the sole solution. Zoning still needs to be fixed and there needs to be massive government investments into co-op housing developments.

commiewithoutorgans , 10 months ago

Read some theory, it kinda sounds like you’re basing this entirely off of YouTube videos you’ve seen (including your understanding of socialism)

Landlords increase rent to make up for it, what does georgism do? Landlords don’t exist as such in socialism, but how they do exist still isn’t really impacted by this shift.

Georgism is a misunderstanding of the causes of issues at the “tax affecting productivity” level. That’s not the cause of our problems.

The lack of massive investment of housing and zoning are, again, results of a problem not the problem itself. These issues don’t exist with good planning, and that’s why georgism is just irrelevant except as a bandage for some of the ills of capitalism temporarily

Olgratin_Magmatoe , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Read some theory, it kinda sounds like you’re basing this entirely off of YouTube videos you’ve seen (including your understanding of socialism)

If you want to convince me, mocking me isn’t the way to go about it. I’m as much of a leftist/anti-capitalist as it gets in my area, and I almost certainly agree with you on more things than the average american. If you can’t even hold a civil conversation with me, how could you ever hope to convince anybody else?

But yes, most of this is based on a rather light understanding as I have already mentioned. I live in the U.S., a capitalist country that very intentionally does not allow workers to have free time. I have a disabled girlfriend that I take care of. The amount of time I have to myself that is truly free time is extremely limited. I’d rather spend that time playing video games and watching youtube than reading economics books. It’s shocking, I know. And during the rare times that I am able to find the time/energy to read, I’d rather read science fiction, which rarely if ever goes into economic theory.

Landlords increase rent to make up for it, what does georgism do? Landlords don’t exist as such in socialism, but how they do exist still isn’t really impacted by this shift.

Again, they can’t exactly just increase rent to pass off the tax.

The lack of massive investment of housing and zoning are, again, results of a problem not the problem itself. These issues don’t exist with good planning

How is investment in housing and zoning fixes not a form of better planning?

georgism is just irrelevant except as a bandage for some of the ills of capitalism temporarily

I disagree that it is just a bandage. But even if it was, I’d rather have a bandage than a fucking open wound like we have now.

If the government doesn’t collect wealth in the form of a land tax, how do you suggest we do it?

commiewithoutorgans , 10 months ago

Not to pester too much, but georgism, philosophically, seems entirely based in an attempt to find some liberal justification for a broad solution to many problems. It attempts to find some legal method within the assumptions of the capitalist system (ownership as it exists in capitalism being key) to mitigate the problems that the original assumption creates. Capitalism will just react and reform to its benefit around those new mitigations systems like it always does. But the georgists ideas remain limited to the set of possibilities that capitalists have limited debate to.

WhiteTiger , 10 months ago

Don’t waste your breath, if anything Lemmy is somehow less financially literate than reddit.

AOCapitulator , 10 months ago

You’re the one person I hope becomes homeless very-intelligent

420blazeit69 , 10 months ago

Landlords pay up front (directly or via a loan

You’re describing a developer. Most landlords aren’t developers.

And yes, the government should take on the role of developing residential properties and ensuring everyone has access to them. Housing is not a commodity, it’s a basic human need.

BraveSirZaphod , 10 months ago

Food is also a basic human need, and markets seem to work well-enough for that. The core difference is that, while we have an extreme abundance of food to the point of waste, cities have been underbuilding housing for decades and there are far more people wanting to move to them than available housing units, so only the richest people get the housing. This puts a lot of positive pressure on housing prices

Olgratin_Magmatoe , 10 months ago

Food is also a basic human need, and markets seem to work well-enough for that

That’s because it is easy to compete to sell food. Housing doesn’t work that way.

cities have been underbuilding housing for decades

It’s not just cities, but I otherwise agree.

BraveSirZaphod , 10 months ago

That’s because it is easy to compete to sell food. Housing doesn’t work that way.

Agreed, but there's a lot that could be done to make it much much easier. For nearly a century, housing policy has been explicitly designed to make housing a productive asset for investment, which is a goal that's fundamentally opposed to housing being affordable.

Olgratin_Magmatoe , 10 months ago

Agreed. Housing is a right, a basic necessity, not an investment vehicle.

came_apart_at_Kmart , 10 months ago

not to mention, many big developers aren’t paying cash to construct housing. they get a loan or establish a line of credit with or brokered via investors/banks/funds. the first rule of doing anything under capitalism is to use somebody else’s money to do it, and all those loans drawing on lines of credit ultimately leads back to the central bank anyway.

it’s a massive shell game to obscure the fact that workers do all the work to create the products and services and then have to pay their shitty wages right back to access the very things they create, just so maybe 2-3 million megarich assholes can roll around in piles of money and make an income for doing literally nothing.

landlords are among the most nakedly parasitic sectors of society, and even then we still get bootlicking bozos pretending they “provide” housing or are somehow responsible for the community infrastructure that makes living in the place where the house exists desirable.

BurgerPunk , 10 months ago

Oh the risk! Well sure that entitles them to take money from people who actually work. Go find a landlord and bootlicker

silent_water , 10 months ago

of course they do. we actually understand that production doesn’t require middle men. we’re communists, fool.

BurgerPunk , 10 months ago

No they usually don’t pay for anything to be built. Even if they did, they just pay for it with other peoples labor (their renters)

SwingingKoala , 10 months ago

Half of the apartments I lived in were built by their owners or by their parents. And not as in literally built as all the idiots here try to twist my words.

bagend , 10 months ago

And not as in literally built

So who actually built them?

SwingingKoala , 10 months ago

Why are you asking questions a five year old could answer?

The_Jewish_Cuban , 10 months ago

Because you don’t seem to be connecting the points together. Lead a horse to water but can’t force it to drink kinda situation.

Landlords didn’t do anything but have capital. Workers built the damn thing.

That’s the water I was talking about.

SwingingKoala , 10 months ago

Exactly the answer I was expecting. People don’t buy things, credit cards do.

boboblaw , 10 months ago

smh at the products of the American school system

you’re replying to someone who said landlords are unnecessary middlemen in the construction of housing. your mocking analogy is “people buying things with credit cards”. do you not see how funny a self-own that is?

the landlords are the credit cards in your analogy. people bought things before credit cards existed. people built housing before landlords existed. landlords are as necessary to the building of housing as credit cards are to the buying of toilet paper.

tho I wouldn’t be surprised if you thought Buttcoin was necessary for cleaning your shitty ass.

SwingingKoala , 10 months ago

tho I wouldn’t be surprised if you thought Buttcoin was necessary for cleaning your shitty ass.

Nah, bitcoin did exactly what I thought it would do, just much faster than expected. It’s funny how many people who think they hate capitalism love the petrodollar system.

silent_water , 10 months ago

jesse-wtf

SwingingKoala , 4 months ago

Hurr durr

DessertStorms , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Never mind how ridiculous your question is to begin with (what do landlords, the useless money syphoning middlepeople, have to do with building???), but the reality is that there are already enough empty properties to house all of the homeless people in most countries you check (US, UK, Canada for starters), not only once, but several times over.

It isn't lack of housing that causes homelessness, it's capitalism and the selfish greed it encourages.

wizardbeard , 10 months ago

That statistic regarding available housing ignores a lot of things. Where do the resources come from to keep this available housing in livable conditions? What is considered the minimum livable condition for these spaces? Who is responsible for keeping these spaces livable? What guarantee is there that any of this available housing is within reasonable travel distance of other necessities (not even speaking of employment, there’s urban food deserts to consider)?

At some point there is a required expenditure of resources, even if enough physical homes exist.

SunriseParabellum , 10 months ago

Society.

bigboopballs , 10 months ago

When fantasizing, why aim for mediocrity?

Mediocrity is as ambitious as liberals can be

context , 10 months ago

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

polskilumalo , 10 months ago

@Finger

Finger , 10 months ago

I’m Mike Ehrmantraut and I approve this message.