4 ms·

most have jobs.. not sure what your comment is implying. Do you believe landlords should offer their property and services for free?

HarryHirsch 6y ago
He is talking about the lemon problem. Landowners are as a rule completely worthless. A conscientious landowner (if such a thing existed) spends more on maintenance but cannot recover the outlays because most everyone else makes higher profits and drives him out of business. We need a revolution.
- monkeywork 6y ago
  >Landowners are as a rule completely worthless That's funny seems to me that without them we would have a LOT of homeless people. They have an asset and allow others to use it for a fee.... banks do the same thing, they have liquid capital they offer to others for a fee... would you say that banks as a rule are completely worthless? If we are talking about a fantasy utopia where 250-300 families who don't know each other are all going to gather together and put funds together to build an apartment complex in a major city and run it like a co-op then continue to live in fantasy land because that rarely if ever is the case.
  - Loughla 6y ago
    >would you say that banks as a rule are completely worthless? OP didn't talk about banks, and I'm not sure the comparison is even valid. As for your second paragraph. This is a possibility. Why don't we do this? That seems like a good business opportunity. Someone to organize the coop, provide startup investment, and receive a fee for x# of years afterward. Like a mortgage, but for coops, requiring coop rules and regulations for everyone involved. That seems interesting.
    - eppsilon 6y ago
      Sounds a lot like a condo?
      - monkeywork 6y ago
        you mean like a condo that only exists because the contractor KNOWS it will sell all it's units, and the reason they know it is because rental companies buy in bulk.
      - Loughla 6y ago
        Hmm. Yep. Exactly like a condo. For context - I live in rural America, and have virtually no concept of how condos run. After googling - Are they really collective? Like, everyone for the greater good collective, or everyone for that one pissed off old man who wants to run the HOA collective? And do you actually own the condo at the end, or is it just rent? I like when I am ignorant of something! Learning!!
  - Mikeb85 6y ago
    > That's funny seems to me that without them we would have a LOT of homeless people. No you wouldn't because the real estate market would adjust to the lack of landlords. Current prices are the result of the current economic system. If landlords never existed, home-builders and banks would figure out a way to make sure people are paying them to have a home.
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    You don't have government funded housing projects (eg housing associations in your country)? Community built housing can work well if there's the political will to make it work. Why do you think we'd have a lot of homeless people, if people couldn't own more land individually than they needed then there wouldn't be a lack of affordable land. My house 20 years ago was 4x my salary. As it happens I recently started the exact same job, at the same grade. The wage is better compared to the job market than it was before, the house is now 5-6 times the salary (modernised 6-8x, based on several sales in our street last year). It is difficult, because you have to stop rich people from leveraging their power to feed their greed, which means you need politicians who don't just mindlessly do what rich people pay them for.
    - monkeywork 6y ago
      Gov funded housing projects exist yes - are they majority of the construction .. not even close. The problem isn't cost of housing it's that income hasn't grown at same rate.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > That's funny seems to me that without them we would have a LOT of homeless people. We have a LOT of homeless people. So... Though it's true we’d have a lot more if we didn't have the small landowners (i.e., those who are homeowners but not landlords.) It's only the larger landowners that are useless. > They have an asset and allow others to use it for a fee.... Yes, them having the asset is a cause of homelessness. Them allowing others to use it may be a mitigation of the problem, but so would the user simply having the asset. Or the asset being held in common and allocated. Or...
    - monkeywork 6y ago
      >Yes, them having the asset is a cause of homelessness you should really look into what the cause of homelessness is. generally it has a lot more to do with economic issues, addiction issues, etc than it has to do with someone else owning property. >Or the asset being held in common and allocated. Ya that worked out super well in the past letting the ruling class own all the land and everyone else worked it...
      - dragonwriter 6y ago
        > generally it has a lot more to do with economic issues, Distribution of ownership of real property is an “economic issue”, and one intimately linked to homelessness. > Ya that worked out super well in the past letting the ruling class own all the land and everyone else worked it.. Common ownership of land is not the same thing as letting the ruling class (e.g., the nobility in feudalism or the bourgeoisie in capitalism) own all the land.
205guy 6y ago
It's clear the GP meant not be landlords instead of offer property for free. Which got me thinking: what would society look like if there were laws that limited people to owning one single dwelling at a time? What edge cases would need to be covered (I can think of married couples and corporations--so it would need to be one dwelling per taxable entity)? How would you handle hotels, travel, nomadism, etc? Would it be stable and viable?
- TechBro8615 6y ago
  What would happen to all the existing properties? Would the state take them over?
- leetcrew 6y ago
  what about the "edge case" where people don't actually want to own the place where they live? it's hard to imagine how buying/selling a property every 2-ish years would be an improvement over paying a premium to rent.
- 205guy 6y ago
  Thanks for playing along, these are some of the same issues I could think of. I'm thinking of still having private property, just one per person/family as a dwelling, instead of allowing property as investment. You can only own your dwelling: so you couldn't own a house and rent it out while traveling in an RV. But maybe in this new world, it just makes more sense for the government to own it all and lease it out like social housing. You would pay for a length of lease (1-year, 10 years, 30 years or more depending on how you value stability) and then pay the monthly rent. My original thought experiment was more steady state: imagine if society had developed along those lines, how would it looked different. Adopting it from our current situation would require a transition. You'd have x years to convert to the new system, and current landlords would need to sell their portfolio. The state might be the buyer of last resort, at a low price similar to a short sale. For people who are mobile, moving around every few months or years and renters in our current system, the idea of buying and selling property every time seems daunting, so the process would have to be much easier. I think prices would be cheaper due to increased supply, and maybe there ends up being a pool of easy-swappable properties, like rentals now (less fancy, less custom, sparsely furnished, etc.). You also have to cover the case of the move, where you essentially need both properties at the same time. It would also impact cohabitation and marriage customs, because 2 people could have 2 properties, but married couples only one. But the idea isn't that you could somehow still have a property to rent out, it's that owning and renting out a dwelling is forbidden. There is some process of declaring your dwelling (could be an RV for example), and not being able to own property that is someone else's dwelling (I suppose commercial real-estate is still fair game). Maybe speculation on empty land (dwellings-to-be) becomes rampant as the capital is re-allocated. In the end though, there's the problem of capital: even small apartments or homes cost more than people's annual income, so it either takes years to get your first dwelling, and where do you live in the meantime. It just seems the economy needs a way to pay for fractional dwelling use, so it's cheaper for those without capital (people who haven't accumulated it yet and people who "choose" not to accumulate). Still a fun what-if scenario, and I still wonder if there is a stable and viable solution.

HarryHirsch 6y ago

He is talking about the lemon problem. Landowners are as a rule completely worthless. A conscientious landowner (if such a thing existed) spends more on maintenance but cannot recover the outlays because most everyone else makes higher profits and drives him out of business. We need a revolution.

monkeywork 6y ago
>Landowners are as a rule completely worthless That's funny seems to me that without them we would have a LOT of homeless people. They have an asset and allow others to use it for a fee.... banks do the same thing, they have liquid capital they offer to others for a fee... would you say that banks as a rule are completely worthless? If we are talking about a fantasy utopia where 250-300 families who don't know each other are all going to gather together and put funds together to build an apartment complex in a major city and run it like a co-op then continue to live in fantasy land because that rarely if ever is the case.
- Loughla 6y ago
  >would you say that banks as a rule are completely worthless? OP didn't talk about banks, and I'm not sure the comparison is even valid. As for your second paragraph. This is a possibility. Why don't we do this? That seems like a good business opportunity. Someone to organize the coop, provide startup investment, and receive a fee for x# of years afterward. Like a mortgage, but for coops, requiring coop rules and regulations for everyone involved. That seems interesting.
  - eppsilon 6y ago
    Sounds a lot like a condo?
    - monkeywork 6y ago
      you mean like a condo that only exists because the contractor KNOWS it will sell all it's units, and the reason they know it is because rental companies buy in bulk.
    - Loughla 6y ago
      Hmm. Yep. Exactly like a condo. For context - I live in rural America, and have virtually no concept of how condos run. After googling - Are they really collective? Like, everyone for the greater good collective, or everyone for that one pissed off old man who wants to run the HOA collective? And do you actually own the condo at the end, or is it just rent? I like when I am ignorant of something! Learning!!
- Mikeb85 6y ago
  > That's funny seems to me that without them we would have a LOT of homeless people. No you wouldn't because the real estate market would adjust to the lack of landlords. Current prices are the result of the current economic system. If landlords never existed, home-builders and banks would figure out a way to make sure people are paying them to have a home.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  You don't have government funded housing projects (eg housing associations in your country)? Community built housing can work well if there's the political will to make it work. Why do you think we'd have a lot of homeless people, if people couldn't own more land individually than they needed then there wouldn't be a lack of affordable land. My house 20 years ago was 4x my salary. As it happens I recently started the exact same job, at the same grade. The wage is better compared to the job market than it was before, the house is now 5-6 times the salary (modernised 6-8x, based on several sales in our street last year). It is difficult, because you have to stop rich people from leveraging their power to feed their greed, which means you need politicians who don't just mindlessly do what rich people pay them for.
  - monkeywork 6y ago
    Gov funded housing projects exist yes - are they majority of the construction .. not even close. The problem isn't cost of housing it's that income hasn't grown at same rate.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > That's funny seems to me that without them we would have a LOT of homeless people. We have a LOT of homeless people. So... Though it's true we’d have a lot more if we didn't have the small landowners (i.e., those who are homeowners but not landlords.) It's only the larger landowners that are useless. > They have an asset and allow others to use it for a fee.... Yes, them having the asset is a cause of homelessness. Them allowing others to use it may be a mitigation of the problem, but so would the user simply having the asset. Or the asset being held in common and allocated. Or...
  - monkeywork 6y ago
    >Yes, them having the asset is a cause of homelessness you should really look into what the cause of homelessness is. generally it has a lot more to do with economic issues, addiction issues, etc than it has to do with someone else owning property. >Or the asset being held in common and allocated. Ya that worked out super well in the past letting the ruling class own all the land and everyone else worked it...
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > generally it has a lot more to do with economic issues, Distribution of ownership of real property is an “economic issue”, and one intimately linked to homelessness. > Ya that worked out super well in the past letting the ruling class own all the land and everyone else worked it.. Common ownership of land is not the same thing as letting the ruling class (e.g., the nobility in feudalism or the bourgeoisie in capitalism) own all the land.

205guy 6y ago

It's clear the GP meant not be landlords instead of offer property for free. Which got me thinking: what would society look like if there were laws that limited people to owning one single dwelling at a time? What edge cases would need to be covered (I can think of married couples and corporations--so it would need to be one dwelling per taxable entity)? How would you handle hotels, travel, nomadism, etc? Would it be stable and viable?

TechBro8615 6y ago
What would happen to all the existing properties? Would the state take them over?
leetcrew 6y ago
what about the "edge case" where people don't actually want to own the place where they live? it's hard to imagine how buying/selling a property every 2-ish years would be an improvement over paying a premium to rent.
205guy 6y ago
Thanks for playing along, these are some of the same issues I could think of. I'm thinking of still having private property, just one per person/family as a dwelling, instead of allowing property as investment. You can only own your dwelling: so you couldn't own a house and rent it out while traveling in an RV. But maybe in this new world, it just makes more sense for the government to own it all and lease it out like social housing. You would pay for a length of lease (1-year, 10 years, 30 years or more depending on how you value stability) and then pay the monthly rent. My original thought experiment was more steady state: imagine if society had developed along those lines, how would it looked different. Adopting it from our current situation would require a transition. You'd have x years to convert to the new system, and current landlords would need to sell their portfolio. The state might be the buyer of last resort, at a low price similar to a short sale. For people who are mobile, moving around every few months or years and renters in our current system, the idea of buying and selling property every time seems daunting, so the process would have to be much easier. I think prices would be cheaper due to increased supply, and maybe there ends up being a pool of easy-swappable properties, like rentals now (less fancy, less custom, sparsely furnished, etc.). You also have to cover the case of the move, where you essentially need both properties at the same time. It would also impact cohabitation and marriage customs, because 2 people could have 2 properties, but married couples only one. But the idea isn't that you could somehow still have a property to rent out, it's that owning and renting out a dwelling is forbidden. There is some process of declaring your dwelling (could be an RV for example), and not being able to own property that is someone else's dwelling (I suppose commercial real-estate is still fair game). Maybe speculation on empty land (dwellings-to-be) becomes rampant as the capital is re-allocated. In the end though, there's the problem of capital: even small apartments or homes cost more than people's annual income, so it either takes years to get your first dwelling, and where do you live in the meantime. It just seems the economy needs a way to pay for fractional dwelling use, so it's cheaper for those without capital (people who haven't accumulated it yet and people who "choose" not to accumulate). Still a fun what-if scenario, and I still wonder if there is a stable and viable solution.