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
Companies shouldn’t be able to own homes.
I wonder what happens in that case? 🤔 Oh, totally forgot. Venezuela, Cuba, USSR, North Korea. Not sure I want to end up with something like that. How many more times people need to repeat these horrible communist experiments to learn that this is not the good way to live?! Speaking from experience growing up in USSR in the 80s. Yes, capitalism sucks, but other options are often worse.
Edit: keep downvoting, it’s much easier than writing a factual argument.
Why should a landlord be prevented from registering his property under his company?
Landlords shouldn’t be able to own homes.
That works well as a thought terminating slogan online. Less so as a practice in the real life.
I’d hope it was a thought commencing slogan, maybe giving people curiosity as to think:
“How could another sapient person believe something so different from my own beliefs? That person is even making it a joke, therefore they must have had it bouncing around in their brain a bunch, so they must believe it and think about it a lot. Huh, maybe there is something more to know, and think about.”
I even made a comment with a small answer, to the other person, who asked like a human.
Clearly didn’t work on you though.
When people drop these one-liners that perfectly align with the popular view of the platform, my first assumption is that they in fact have not thought about it and instead are just saying the popular thing for applause.
Perhaps that’s a cynical view but in my experience it seems true more often than not. You too walked back on your original statement after being questioned on it. I can’t learn from people who don’t say what they mean or mean what they say.
Hm, I see your point about clarity.
My original comment “landlords shouldn’t be allowed to own houses” was a joke, in the sense that it is an impossible paradox, with the implied statement being “landlords shouldn’t exist”.
That is indeed the prevailing view on this platform, because it’s a leftist/marxist/anarchist platform, mostly.
I might not be the right person to give you a pointer directly into the theory of those, but I have a number of YouTubers I really like, that talk about these issues, and make incredibly good explanations.
Two I’m really into, lately, are NonCompete, and Unlearning Economics, that have some great video essays, the first one about communist perspectives, the second going in depth against things that are considered “common sense” in capitalist economics, and their real results when actually looked at.
I’d say you can click on their channels and click whatever interests you most (NonCompete has a video on thought terminating clichés lol), but I can also recommend a couple specific videos:
On NonCompete, there’s a video that contains a pretty good explanation of what is called the class war, that is, what tools the rich use, to keep the poor working. Housing costing so much, is one of those tools.
On Unlearning Economics, there is a personal favorite of mine, Free stuff is good actually. It’s more about the adjacent philosophies, but you can easily extrapolate from it, to housing, if you like spending an hour listening to a guy talking about economics lol.
Internet comments are so bad at conveying rich ideas, and so easy to not notice the humanity behind people, that it’s refreshing to have people like you answer, with the honest intent behind what they wrote. I hope what I sent interests you!
Why not?
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.
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.
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.
There’s a reason “rent seeking” is a derogatory term.
Investing in precious metals would fall into your definition and I don’t see how it’s harmful to society
You don’t rent out precious metals, you sell them.
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Because companies shouldn’t be able to own homes.
To hold the landlord personally responsible for the homes they own.
Ok, not sure if you really wanted a response here. Always feel awkward responding to a one-sentence comment with an essay, but to answer your question, this is required. Or TL:DR: companies exist for limited liability, and limited liability is grossly inappropriate for rental housing.
We’ve really lost the plot with what corporations and limited liability were invented for. The original idea behind incorporation was that it allowed people to invest in something with many other people, and to limit individual investor losses on risky megaprojects.
The early corporations were for things like major canal projects or overseas trading ventures. Let’s say a canal would be a good idea somewhere, but the cost will be enormous. The only way to fund it is to have thousands of people pool their investments for it. Those thousands of people aren’t going to be involved in running the project. Maybe they’re just investing the equivalent of a hundred or a few thousand dollars today. But without limited liability, if the canal project goes under, every investor is fully responsible for the debts of that venture. You may invest only a thousand, but if the canal goes under before it finishes, without limited liability, you could be on the hook for many times your original investment. Limited liability allowed for the democratization of investment. Without it, only the rich are able to truly invest in things.
Historically, this was a huge barrier to investment and economic development. Rome for example didn’t have anything like our modern finance system; most things were produced in large family businesses. You couldn’t just go buy stock in a venture to invest in it. If you weren’t willing to fund the entire thing, run the entire thing, and be responsible for the entire thing, you couldn’t invest in it.
This is what corporations were meant to solve - the problem of funding large risky projects beyond the ability of single investors to reasonably afford. Historically, you couldn’t just go and register a corporation on a whim. Often they required acts of legislative bodies to create them. They were seen as morally dubious in many ways - after all, shouldn’t everyone be responsible for the consequences of their own actions? Limited liability gets away from this. The bargain was made that though limited liability sacrifices some amount of fairness and justice, the prosperity the projects it allows will produce will be worth it on net.
But that isn’t how incorporation is used today. Today, landlords will open up dozens of LLCs. They’ll put a single property into each LLC. If a tenant is seriously injured due to the landlord’s neglect, the most they can ever sue the landlord for is the value of the property they rent. The landlord could own a hundred properties - the most you can ever sue them for is the one you’re renting. In a serious injury, you could be on the hook for millions in lifelong medical expenses, and your landlord may be sitting on a fortune of a hundred million of dollars, but you can only ever sue them for the few hundred thousand the property you rent is worth. The company you’re renting from doesn’t own any more assets than that.
Rent seeking is not the type of risky moonshot venture that incorporation was invented for. Incorporation for landlords is not about encouraging moonshot investments, it’s just a state subsidy for landlords. It’s not like we wouldn’t have rental units without incorporation. Most of the citizens of Rome rented. The concept of renting is likely as old as the concept of a city. The rental market worked just fine without limited liability.
This type of liability risk should not be handled as a subsidy by the state. Landlords can already purchase liability insurance. And that’s how they should have to handle all the risks of being sued by their tenants. Someone with a dozen rental units can get a $5 million liability policy if they don’t want to put their entire net worth on the line in the event one of their tenants being seriously hurt.
And crucially, such a system would much better protect tenants. We currently just give the subsidy of limited liability to landlords as a gift. We ask for nothing in return. Insurance companies aren’t so generous. If you want a liability policy for your rental units, the insurance company is going to want to have a say in how those units are operated and maintained. The insurance company doesn’t want to insure a dilapidated death trap of a rental house.
I don’t think landlords should be able to put rental houses into LLCs, because I think we’ve completely lost the plot on what corporations were meant to achieve. Hell, I would set the minimum number of owners for a corporation to be a hundred people (with limits on how much a single individual can own.) Incorporation was meant as a tool for crowd-sourcing daring and groundbreaking infrastructure, research, and other ventures. It was never intended to be a gift to rich people operating ordinary businesses that they have complete individual control and ownership over.
This was a great read, thank you.
“the most they can ever sue the landlord for is the value of the property they rent” - why?
Because the landlord, i.e. the LLC, only owns that property, and nothing else
Is that how LLCs work?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_liability
Sounds ripe for fraud
Landlords should be prevented from breathing.
Good luck
Landlords should not exist. Hope that clears it up for you.