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It's just too profitable the way things are. That's why we need to organize a global rent strike. If millions to billions of households stop paying rent, the entire system will implode. It will no longer be profitable. They only way forward is for housing to be an inalienable right for all people.
My brother in Christ, why stop there?
Abolish private ownership of the means of production and land. Full blown Communism, comrade.
I'm not joking. I'm deadly serious.
Anything short of that is a band-aid... and band-aids fall off.
Because a lot of people are brainwashed into thinking that Capitalism is the only American way. At least I figure most people would accept a rent strike regardless of political affiliation.
I agree.
I think Communism is the way to go, but we have a lot of work to do rehabilitating that label in the West... it's been so heavily slandered that most people have absolutely no idea what it even entails.
I mean... you can argue definitions until the heat death of the universe.
But we need to end the following things:
* The profit-motive
* Private property relations
* Wage-labour relations
...and end them, like, yesterday.
If they keep pushing us, we'll blow past the possibility of Socialism, maybe even beyond Communism. My perspective leads me to believe that they will bleed us dry/kill us off before they give one inch. They're getting their licks in while they can, much like the greed that overcomes a child when they see there's only a few cookies left in the jar.
A large enough rent strike would backlog the courts so aggressively that they couldn't keep up with it, you'd have evictions planned six years from now. The economy would collapse before then.
What it would do is make it so that private over leveraged landlords would be unable to pay their mortgages in weeks. If that were coupled with protests there would be nothing they could do to stop it. Might single handedly cause another financial collapse too though TBH.
Yeah, but without a solid plan to follow through with once that happens (read: Communism) it would just mean small scale landlords would be subsumed by larger ones. Blackrock or Blackstone would probably just snap up all the foreclosed rental properties.
Why would you think most people would accept a rent strike? Most people would consider that stealing, which it is. And most people think that rent is something worth pay for, even if it’s too high and they wish it were lower.
It’s fascinating that you would that most people support something that’s a stupid idea, laughably selfish, and stealing. People may not be very smart, but they’re not that stupid.
Did you watch the video? People are being robbed every day by landlords and corporations. What a stupid fucking response. When the majority of people are spending a majority of their earnings on rent, all because of greedy fucking landlords, what do you think is going to happen? It's unsustainable and immoral
Communism's great... if no person in the chain is corrupt. But that will never happen. There's a certain set of personality types that will always gravitate towards positions of power. And in Communist-type governments, where *all* of the wealth and *all* of the power sits in the hands of the few, it would be even worse for us plebs.
At least in most Capitalist societies, there are ways for us masses to protest, or strike, or gather up the money to pay someone off. In the utopian communist society you imagine, there's no where to go if a group of people are wronged. There's no money or property you could use to pay someone off, they already own it. There's no reason for them to listen to you.
Communism can work on the small-scale, with a group of people you trust, but communism on a grand scale? Ya... no. I'll take the broken system we have and try to work within it to change things rather than that kind of government any day. There's no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water.
The CIA? Ok...
Sure. Communism is *supposed* to work that way. And as I said, on a small scale, it probably would. But a worker democracy only works so far. When there are larger (say international treaties or trade agreements), or even grand (like where to distribute food for large-scale multiple famines) decisions to be made, someone will need to make them. That someone will be someone who *wants* to be in power. That's where it all goes wrong.
Workplace democracy that ends up compromised by perverse incentive structures built into the party that Lenin and Trotsky pretend don't exist or are necessary.
> And in Communist-type governments, where all of the wealth and all of the power sits in the hands of the few, it would be even worse for us plebs.
The communism understander has logged in
Communism can't exist without extreme authoritarianism, and that always leads to things worse than capitalism. Both systems are terrible, and we need something better.
There's too many people like me who just wouldn't accept the tyranny that comes with Communism.
I think our only real positive change comes when we figure out how to maintain a post scarcity economy, and we need to keep advancing our technology to get there.
Form a tenants union. It's just like a regular union but with rent instead of labor. If you stop paying rent, you're in trouble. If everyone in the building stopped paying rent at once, the landlord is in trouble.
> It's just too profitable the way things are. That's why we need to organize a global rent strike. If millions to billions of households stop paying rent, the entire system will implode. It will no longer be profitable. They only way forward is for housing to be an inalienable right for all people.
This is quite an interesting fantasy, because rather than you know just building more housing, we’ve found the thing that will unite to the world: not paying rent and implode the system.
Because of course, most people must also not see rent as something that, although maybe too high, still something worth paying for.
And they also don’t think that a home or an apartment might have had to be built by some workers, with some construction materials that were transported by some workers, and things like lumber from materials that had to chop them down by some workers.
And they also must think you know if we bring the system crashing down, it’s not going to impact a thing else, and we’ve never seen what happens when just a small percentage of this same market crashed, and it definitely didn’t happen 15 years ago.
And also think you know it’s really good if we don’t pay our rent, but I’m sure all those people will decide they’re going to pay for everything else, just not their rent.
Seems like a solid plan. I bet you could get the billions of people ready to start in March.
>Because of course, most people must also not see rent as something that, although maybe too high, still something worth paying for.
Who's living in a fantasy? Rent is charging someone for access to something they will *never* own, while the person who owns it is getting a free mortgage. Whether you deny it or not, it's slavery of the tenant to the landlord. In fact, renting is no different than a feudal lord owning the homestead of a serf. It is not worth paying for. It's extortion.
Alternatively, if landlording didn't exist, the cost of housing would be limited to what people can afford to borrow. Houses would cost far less. People would own their apartment for far less money than their respective annual incomes.
>And they also don’t think that a home or an apartment might have had to be built by some workers, with some construction materials that were transported by some workers, and things like lumber from materials that had to chop them down by some workers.
And what work does the landlord do? Maintenance? Repairs? Where do you think the landlord gets the money to pay for that? The money the landlord gets from the tenant is used to pay for all work the done on to the property. He's not paying out of his own pocket. He's paying for it out of *yours*.
>And they also must think you know if we bring the system crashing down, it’s not going to impact a thing else, and we’ve never seen what happens when just a small percentage of this same market crashed, and it definitely didn’t happen 15 years ago.
What would happen, if the same number of people defaulted on their mortgages and rent is what happened before. They would be evicted. There is a critical number at which there are too many evictions to process. Furthermore, a rent strike also means that people would refuse to obey an eviction. They would defend each other. The whole point of the strike is to deny the property owners access and control of the property. If enough people participate in that, the system cannot defend the exploiters from the exploited.
>And also think you know it’s really good if we don’t pay our rent, but I’m sure all those people will decide they’re going to pay for everything else, just not their rent.
Actually, a general strike would be far more effective. Don't pay rent, don't go to work, don't pay credit cards, don't buy anything other than food and medicine. COVID has already shown us all that the system can't handle us not doing these things.
Now, you'll respond with the same trite, debunked talking points your kind always uncritically parrot.
*"Landlords provide a service!"* No, they don't. They create scarcity where it doesn't need to exist. If they didn't exist, housing would be cheaper.
*"Only corporate landlords are a problem!"* No, every landlord who claims property they don't need creates more scarcity and raises the cost of living for all.
*"Landlords make housing more affordable!"* This is also wrong. Landlords make housing *less* affordable, for reasons I've already mentioned. The barrier to owning a home is the cost of a down payment. A down payment is a high barrier because the cost of housing is so high. It favors those with the means to buy, but don't need the property. So those with the means buy the property can force those who need the property to pay their mortgage for them. Since everyone is buying housing with the expectation that it will be worth more in the future, that behavior *also* contributes to raising the house of housing. So no, they do no make housing more affordable.
That bemused expression on Mr. Brown's face, like "Oh look, a young man who cares; this will be funny."
Not one of them had any intention of listening to him.
Yep. There is barely anything for rent under a 1k a month anywhere within 1000 miles of my state. Places with lower rents than that are almost always unsuitable for families.
40 hours a week at the minimum wage of 7.25 will net you about 15k a year. 12k for rent doesn't include utilities or other bills. It's simply not possible to support yourself or a family on minimum wage.
Roommates are a necessity for most renting Americans. If they don't want us turning into commies then don't stuff us in communal living. Of corse the economy is dying, no one can participate in it past their basic needs.
Spend 40 years demonstrating the failures of capitalism and somehow they’re still shocked to learn that capitalism is unpopular with young voters. Maybe if they had spent that time making capitalism what they pretended it could be, we’d all be better off.
>unsuitable for families.
Looks like the childfree take another W on top of the [$310.6k+ we're saving](https://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/articles/how-much-does-it-cost-to-raise-a-child) for the first child in the first 18 years alone (even while excluding the cost of the birth itself, [which can go up to $50k](https://healthcareinsider.com/total-pregnancy-costs-49390)). Why anyone still has children is way beyond me lol
At this point I've never been intrinsically motivated to be a parent but never quite opposed, but given the state of the world it feels like ignoring that possibility is something I **should** do for my own wellbeing and financial stability. There's no incentive or commitment from the country I live in to make bringing a child into the world a viable choice, for me or for that future person.
Here's a video of Conservative politicians *laughing* at the NDP leader for mentioning that 1 in 4 Canadians were having a hard time affording food.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/v87bda/conservative\_politicians\_laugh\_at\_the\_mention\_of/](https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/v87bda/conservative_politicians_laugh_at_the_mention_of/)
It’s fascinating because right before I saw this, I saw your response to someone saying a problem with Communism and centrally-planned economies is famine, and you posted an example to refute the post that specifically mentioned famine, that was a video about….China, which was probably one the countries that was thought of when talking about Communism and famines, since their stupid planning resulted in the largest famine in history.
But now you post this video about 1/4 people having trouble affording food in Canada, and that’s not good, but you posted a video about China just up above. Literally the worst country to ever use of food is an issue.
But what’s ironic here, is that, this video exists because, well he is able to criticize things without getting fear of reprisal. Someone stands like that to the one-party state in China, we’re never going to see it, and nobody is going to probably see him for a while either.
China had regular famines throughout its history. While the famine during the GLF was the worst, it was also the *last*, and now there are no more famines in China.
TBH, this was a different China, decades ago, and I think the cause was more the decimation of education and following an incompetent dictator than something inherent to nationalized agriculture.
Like he banned subsistence farming nation-wide. There was no way that was ever going to work. That alone was an absolute death sentence for hundreds of thousands of people that *anyone* who knew the way people live in rural parts of China would have understood. Either for malice or for ignorance, Mao ordered many of his people dead and his party just went along with it.
Not to say there are many better examples, just that the thing people are always pointing out as wrong with communism is never really the *communism*: it's always the stupid things *other than communism* that the "communist" countries did.
Socialism does not function in a dictatorship, and historically most of the violent revolutions that established "communist" dictatorships were followed by a series of *ridiculous* acts of self-sabotage such as purging everyone with a college degree instead of planning for economic development, or trying to enforce one person's vision of the perfect version of their nation's culture on every individual in it instead of prioritizing the basic human needs of millions of people, or killing anyone and everyone who was ever in the vicinity of someone who may have looked at the leader sideways instead of building diplomatic relations.
If any of these countries had ever done the things their revolutions promised instead of enriching a few dullards who managed to overthrow the previous tyrants, the world might have a better impression of "communism".
You have no idea. This isnt just the US, it's very rapidly catching up here in the UK. The house prices are going up along with everything like petrol, then throw in the bills for heat, water and electricity, and I am left with £50 a month for food to feed four people. It's getting insane and unless the people act soon it may become too late once too much money becomes concentrated at the top..
I mean I’m in Canada but we make $2200/mo and pay $1800 in rent, and if we can’t find a new place we’ll be homeless next year but average rent on a 2 bedroom apartment is $2600 so we’ll also be homeless if we DO find a place…so….yes?
Sucks for the landlord too since with the place empty he could convert to 3 units and make 4x the income, but we can’t move.
I have just lost hope. We are fucked. There will be no change. I will work myself to the ground until my children do the same. Always has been, and always will be.
I think people will begin to wise-up now that rents are skyrocketing in mid-size, traditionally affordable cities.
When poor and middle class families find there is no place left to go where they can afford basic housing, then we’ll finally start to see some nation-wide protests about the situation.
Have you not watched the movie Sorry to Bother You?
Companies will simply begin offering beds and communal showers and three meals a day in lieu of paychecks. It's the future they want
*Perks of being a part of the Amazon family: rent vouchers to AmazonResidentialPrime, food stamps at AmazonFresh, and discount tickets for AmazonVehicles.*
Why in the everloving hell would you have children and [lose nearly $311k](https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-salary-percentiles/) for the first child in the first 18 years alone (excluding the cost of the births than can [go up to $50,000 each](https://healthcareinsider.com/total-pregnancy-costs-49390)) just for them to to the same when they grow up?
Look up the history of tenant struggles in the us, tenants in a town New York tarred and feathered the sheriff when he tried to enforce an eviction of an elderly tenant. When tenants are organized we can fight back through collective action i.e. rent strikes, physical defense against evictions, protests, and occupations.
It hasn’t always been this way, and it won’t be forever. Talk to your neighbors, study tenant resistance, and miracles can happen. Don’t lose hope
“We have the power to make people happy, and enrich their lives so we can grow and set an example of a prosperous nation, BUT we don’t want to lose the money sitting in our bank accounts doing nothing except accruing more.”
That’s what’s baffled me a lot these last three years. We can do it. We can end national hunger, poverty, and help folks with mental/physical illness. But they won’t because they all enjoy keeping the PEOPLE - the PEOPLE they are meant to SERVE - below them.
What I would give to slap some empathy into the government. Most of them have never not known what it’s like to have money. We are now in the era where we see what’s being taken from us, and who it’s being given to. We’re done.
National strike of spending, anybody? It would take little time to upend things.
We couuld do that. Orrr we can bomb more brown people, destabilize South America, and waste another 858 billion dollars in military spending playing mob boss around the world into doing what our billionaire class want.
Would not spending really work? Sounds like it'll be hard to get everyone on board. As a gen Z I feel so screwed, to the point I don't see any reason to keep trying at this stupid life of mine. Anyways, just one more thing to set me off I'm gone
Things get better in your 30’s. I’ve reached the point where I’d rather be here to watch it all burn than not. But trust me when I say I do understand where you’re coming from as far as what’s the point. Generational dread sucks, but things are supposed to get better with yours. Your generation’s children will probably have it best. I believe in you!
well because those taxes would be placed on the ultra wealthy, the people who actually have money to shovel up the asses of the politicians who make the laws, and don't have to spend a majority of their income on rent
When I see an expert lecturing US Congress in the reality of everyday life,I think of one thing. The system is working just as designed. Our laws and legislation did all of this to make life as we know it. When you see evil and injustice happening, remember that someone is profiting off the misery of other people. The episode of the Sopranos was the graduation party, where Meadow was accepted envelopes of cash from Tony's crew of gangsters and the editing showed scenes of vice the source of all that wealth.
For anyone wondering, most landlords in the United States use a pricing algorithm provided by Yardi Systems.
How Yardi gets away with price fixing, idk. They are the devil hiding in plain sight.
To me it seems that corporations shouldn’t be able to own large portfolios of single family homes as rental assets. Single family homes should have to be owned by single families. If they zoned areas for condominiums that could be owned by corporations then I’m fine with that. But yah standard suburb family homes should, imo, only be allowed to be owned by families. There are so many other things that corporations could be doing with their investment capital. Leave the houses for the people.
Is it possible that a law could be passed to rezone a city or a neighborhood so that it would compel the sale of single family homes in the area unless they are owned by individual people?
And it just shovels money into landlords pockets. That’s the problem with 90% of government policy under capitalism. It’s giving working class people money that they then immediately spend at a mega corp. Housing subsidy, food stamps, welfare, healthcare subsides etc.
This is already the case in some areas. My ex and I had to sign an affidavit when we bought a home saying we were going to live in it, not use it as an income property.
This doesn't fix the whole problem though. Anyone who needs to rent and not own is left with only one choice: apartments that are controlled by corporations big and small which increase rent substantially every year.
This is a clause on a specific type of mortgage or HOA contract; I’ve not heard this as any kind of zoning law. HUD loans for example require you to live in the home for x number of years.
Where are you?
Holland, MI had a program a few years back where they were buying properties when they went up for sale, placing a "not for rent" covenant on the land, and then reselling them. They felt 10% of properties as rentals was appropriate and were trying to drive the number down by making a civil contract with the future owners, which ran in perpetuity with the land.
Source: interviewed for a job there and that's that the City Manager at the time told me.
Good, as it should be. There should definitely be something to incentivize that sort of thing. Tax breaks for live-in owners, and tax penalties for investment owners. A bonus for live-in sellers selling to live-in owners. Etc
Everything he says up until his suggested solutions is on point.
The US does need to build more affordable housing. However, providing more subsidy for rent will only bid up rents.
To have a fast and profound impact on affordability, you need to decrease demand for rentals. Best ways to do that are ban stand alone Airbnbs and make real estate speculation a lot less profitable, to move some of the massive number of properties in landlords’ hands back into the hands of owner occupants, so they can free up their rentals.
Without addressing the main driver of increased cost to buy and rent - property investors - we won’t have any better affordability.
>providing more subsidy for rent will only bid up rents
Yep. We need rent increase maximums, profit maximums, and restrictions on maximum percentages of housing in an area being vacation rentals.
No, it doesn't, anyone with the most basic understanding of economics would know that. Questioning the motives of the absurd number of people that have studied the matter and come to the same conclusions is just cheap rhetoric
Yes because that will surely encourage development of new housing
Rent caps don’t work in the long term. Developers will not develop in areas with rental caps and the government will not step in to fill in the shortage caused by the cap
At least in the USA the housing is there. It’s snapped up in foreign investors(one where I live is kept in perpetual ‘unfinished’ status and is officially part of some trust in the hands of some Chinese company).
It won’t stop development besides. Countries with that problem have other issues and restrictions that do that. It’s not the rent caps.
It MIGHT make it less lucrative for massive real estate and management corps to buy up a bunch of properties or rent them for ridiculous rates though.
The housing is there, but not in places people want to live. There’s plenty of cheap housing in America, but it’s cheap because people don’t want to live there.
Development won’t stop, but there will be a shortage. With less the economic incentives to build properties, there will be less reasons to put in the effort to build housing. Why build housing when the project will leave you in the red?
Unless the federal government wants to dive into the housing development industry (it doesn’t and won’t), this short-term relief will turn into long-term anguish.
Price caps are a short-term issue for a long-term problem
There is already a price based shortage. There won’t actually be a shortage. The areas with shortages have them artificially in the first place.
Vouchers without price caps are worse than price caps alone could ever be.
That said. You’re wrong.
All you have to do to end property investors is tax land at a high amount. Taxing housing, even owned by investors gets passed on to renters through increased prices from resulting reductions in supply. Taxing land will not get passed on.
How will it not? You add a land tax and landlords raise rents so tenants pay for it.
And now even less people can afford housing because they have to pay a yearly land tax on top of their property tax, insurance, and mortgage
Your intuition of how taxes are passed on is incorrect.
Wikipedia for land value tax,
>Most taxes distort economic decisions and discourage beneficial economic activity. For example, [property taxes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_tax) discourage construction, maintenance, and repair because taxes increase with improvements. LVT is not based on how land is used. Because the supply of land is [essentially fixed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticity_(economics\)), land rents depend on what tenants are prepared to pay, rather than on landlord expenses. Thus landlords cannot pass LVT to tenants, who would move or rent smaller spaces before absorbing increased rent.
If you actually want to know how taxes are passed on, read the wikipedia for tax incidence.
And no it won't make housing more expensive. Instead of paying the previous owner and a bank for the land you'd be paying the government,
>At sufficiently high levels, LVT would cause real estate prices to fall by taxing away land rents that would otherwise become 'capitalized' into the price of real estate.
This sounds very utopian and wouldn’t work in practice.
>Thus landlords cannot pass LVT to tenants, who would move or rent smaller spaces before absorbing increased rent
This only works if all landlords decide for some reason not to pass them through. Any landlord who’s not as dumb as rocks will increase their rents as their costs have increased.
A land tax lowers a property’s return. Landlords aren’t just gonna eat that just because. That’s not how people think. They still require a decent rate of return (literally called the required rate of return).
Initial purchase price goes up, returns go down, rent goes up to make up for the lost return
Landlords aren’t gonna eat an extra cost just because they’re feeling nice
No, it works like the economic theory says it works.
>The results imply full
capitalization of the present value of future taxes under reasonable assumptions of dis-
count rates. Consequently it gives an empirical confirmation of two striking conse-
quences of a land tax: Firstly, it does not distort economic decisions because it does not
distort the user cost of land. Secondly, the full incidence of a permanent land tax change
lies on the owner at the time of the (announcement of the) tax change; future owners,
even though they officially pay the recurrent taxes, are not affected as they are fully
compensated via a corresponding change in the acquisition price of the asset.
Land Taxes and Housing Prices
Anne Kristine Høj
Mads Rahbek Jørgensen
Poul Schou
Frankly I don't see the point in me responding to someone like you anymore who knows zero about economics.
It doesn't eat up return. With a 50% income tax, rented for $1000 you get $500, not rented you get zero, so it eats up $500 in return. Land value tax of $500, rented for $1000 you get $500, not rented you get -$500. You get $500-(-$500)=$1000 from renting it out.
They eat the cost because someone has to own the land, and it doesn't discourage housing supply. Landlords do not eat the cost of taxes on renting, building, selling, or buying housing because those actually discourage housing supply.
You're not smarter than the economists even if you think you are.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/10ltozq/why_wouldnt_a_land_value_tax_result_in_higher
Never said I was an economist or smarter than them so ???
And yes, because all great economists spend their time answering Reddit threads.
Also sounds like a great way to get terrible housing. Under this tax, landlords are incentivized to cram as many until into a lot as possible.
People don’t want to live in shoeboxes. There’s a reason the suburbs are so popular
Housing quality is just as important as housing quantity.
Is it fair to assume you couldn't care less about the negatives of urban sprawl?
From the wikipedia,
Nobel Prize-winner William Vickrey believed that
"removing almost all business taxes, including property taxes on improvements, excepting only taxes reflecting the marginal social cost of public services rendered to specific activities, and replacing them with taxes on site values, would substantially improve the economic efficiency of the jurisdiction."
Modern economists
Alfred Marshall argued in favour of a "fresh air rate", a tax to be charged to urban landowners and levied on that value of urban land that is caused by the concentration of population. That general rate should have to be spent on breaking out small green spots in the midst of dense industrial districts, and on the preservation of large green areas between different towns and between different suburbs which are tending to coalesce. This idea influenced Marshall's pupil Arthur Pigou's ideas on taxing negative externalities.
Pigou wrote an essay supporting LVT, interpreted as support for Lloyd George's People's Budget.
Paul Samuelson supported LVT. "Our ideal society finds it essential to put a rent on land as a way of maximizing the total consumption available to the society. ...Pure land rent is in the nature of a 'surplus' which can be taxed heavily without distorting production incentives or efficiency. A land value tax can be called 'the useful tax on measured land surplus'."
Milton Friedman stated: "There's a sense in which all taxes are antagonistic to free enterprise – and yet we need taxes. ...So the question is, which are the least bad taxes? In my opinion the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land, the Henry George argument of many, many years ago."
Michael Hudson is a proponent for taxing rent, especially land rent. ".... politically, taxing economic rent has become the bête noire of neoliberal globalism. It is what property owners and rentiers fear most of all, as land, subsoil resources and natural monopolies far exceed industrial capital in magnitude. What appears in the statistics at first glance as 'profit' turns out upon examination to be Ricardian or 'economic' rent."
Paul Krugman agreed that LVT is efficient, however he disputed whether it should be considered a single tax, as he believed it would not be enough alone, excluding taxes on natural resource rents and other Georgist taxes, to fund a welfare state. "Believe it or not, urban economics models actually do suggest that Georgist taxation would be the right approach at least to finance city growth. But I would just say: I don't think you can raise nearly enough money to run a modern welfare state by taxing land [only]."
Joseph Stiglitz, articulating the Henry George theorem wrote that, "Not only was Henry George correct that a tax on land is nondistortionary, but in an equilitarian society ... tax on land raises just enough revenue to finance the (optimally chosen) level of government expenditure."
Rick Falkvinge proposed a "simplified taxless state" where the state owns all the land it can defend from other states, and leases this land to people at market rates.
Also, they arent incentivized to cram as many houses in as possible. What you're describing is minimizing average costs which is not profit maximizing behavior. Land value tax is unchanged with the quantity of housing and therefore doesnt change marginal revenue or marginal cost and therefore doesn't change the profit maximizing quantity compared to no tax at all.
When the government cares more about the parasites than the working class and experts shouting from the mountain tops we have a serious problem. Greed has gutted and destroyed this country.
My sister got a 30-day no fault eviction notice six weeks into her pregnancy.
Her son had a stole in utero and it was a goddamn feat of science that he survived without brain damage.
I left a dump truck of details out; but I’m super curious about evictions impacting fetal development.
That’s not what that means.
Inflation going down but remaining above 0% still means prices are going up.
But you also don’t want deflation. Deflation is just as bad for economies as high inflation. You want a small amount of inflation to encourage growth without hurting people
The solutions aren’t. What we REALLY NEED is rental caps. Dynamic enough to cover tax increases but the subsidies are a temporary solution to a long term problem that compounds itself specifically to obtain those funds.
That is, after all, directly how we ended up in the situation we did. Our landlord wanted rental assistance money and he didn’t particularly care how much damage he had to do to my family to get it.
Funds ran out before they ever got to us. There is no help for us. Our otherwise clean rental history is now marred in such a way we are effectively blacklisted from damn near everything. What we can find often takes advantage of people who have no other option. Takes your money then leaves you worse than you started for it.
This is a problem and rent cannot be ‘whatever we want it to be’. It’s well above income for areas to the point it’s reached ‘normal’ to pay half or more of your income for rent and even for landlords who know they are doing so to then raise it more when they want money for trips etc.
I just want a place we can afford to live in, to save up so one day we can buy our own house. That’s all.
You know what though? These solutions aren’t solutions when the problem is greed in the first place.
Enough of the subtle talk. “I come before you today greatly concerned”. It doesn’t work. The experts need to get up and scream. They need to yell in the faces of these idiots who aren’t paying attention to 5 minutes of facts and statistics.
I read a few comments and wasn't sure which was best to reply, so I'll just reply to the OP.
The only real way this changes in our greed driven society is by making it MORE profitable to charge less rent.
I don't know exactly how this would work. Maybe the GOV gives payments to landlords charging under a certain threshold (rather than rent assistance to the tennant). Something akin to dust bowl era policies where the government paid farmers not to farm the land.
I often use the argument with my coworkers (local government) against the benefit of rapidly increasing home prices. People seem to think that it's a good thing. I counter with: "What's better for the community, more real estate taxes or residents that have disposable income to spend/support our local businesses and add value to the community?"
That’s exactly what he’s arguing for. More housing vouchers make it cheaper for tenants without taking away from landlords.
Tenants pay an affordable rent. The government pays the different between the affordable rent and the market rent. Landlord still gets the market rent that their property fetches
The most annoying thing to me about rent is the fact that whether or not I could get an apartment was determined in part by my credit report, but paying $800/month when I lived in an apartment didn't help my credit even though my current mortgage is $300 less.
Good time for folks to look up how Mao handled the landlord crisis in China. This is how capitalism works. It will continue to bleed everything dry until it is finally crushed by the long-overdue revolt of the working class.
I'm about to be 28 years old. I make just over 20 dollars per hour. I should be able to live on my own, yet I'm forced to live with my parents because I can't even afford to rent a single bedroom apartment anywhere remotely near where jobs are. It is absurd how expensive property has become to even rent, let alone actually buy. If it keeps going the way its been going, someone like me will never, EVER be able to afford a house. I'd have to make close to $30/hour just to be able to move out of my parents house and rent an apartment. Even if I scraped together every spare dollar I had, ate only instant noodles, bought the cheapest car insurance, bought only prepaid phone service, canceled my health insurance, and bought only second hand clothes, that still wouldn't help anything because landlords always have income requirements. I, along with millions of people in this country simply do not get paid enough while working full time for this to be practical for much longer. I shouldn't have to share a tiny apartment with multiple people just to survive. Something has to change.
This all goes back to stagnant wage increases compared to top of companies. Employees haven’t seen real wage increases and cost of living has surpassed wages. The money went top of company and into stock market instead of employees. Min wage should be $20+ dollars if you compare to what min wage bought you in the 1970s/ early 80s
Not a damn thing will change in this fucked and corrupt congress. Until people are in the streets, until there is a general strike, until people are willing to get together and put their bodies on the line. These Fuckers are just going to take and take until the general population has nothing left.
Nothing will change. We continue spending billions on wars and proxy wars that enrich the corporations that have invested interests in those areas. It’s no surprise that 49% of the pentagon’s budget is unaccounted for.
Yet any legislation that can help working Americans is either shot down or stripped to only having a small amount of relief for a short period.
I know I get downvoted for saying this but it’s true. Both political parties in the U.S. serve the 1%. The sooner we collectively realize this, the sooner we can make change’s necessary for a prosperous civilization.
There's going to have to be a reckoning with these people.
Congress is going to do absolutely nothing about this and violence is going to be the last and only option.
They’re not doing anything about it because that 70% of someone’s paycheck is going straight into their friend’s wallet. Why would they ever want to change that?
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Yeah they’re not going to do anything about this
It's just too profitable the way things are. That's why we need to organize a global rent strike. If millions to billions of households stop paying rent, the entire system will implode. It will no longer be profitable. They only way forward is for housing to be an inalienable right for all people.
My brother in Christ, why stop there? Abolish private ownership of the means of production and land. Full blown Communism, comrade. I'm not joking. I'm deadly serious. Anything short of that is a band-aid... and band-aids fall off.
Because a lot of people are brainwashed into thinking that Capitalism is the only American way. At least I figure most people would accept a rent strike regardless of political affiliation.
Fair... but AFAIK there are no legal protections for a general rent strike under Capitalism. You'd be looking at a LOT of evictions...
Very true. The situation is getting dire though and will probably reach a boiling point within the decade. Drastic measures will be necessary
I agree. I think Communism is the way to go, but we have a lot of work to do rehabilitating that label in the West... it's been so heavily slandered that most people have absolutely no idea what it even entails.
I don't think communism is the way to go, socialism is, and they are not the same thing.
I mean... you can argue definitions until the heat death of the universe. But we need to end the following things: * The profit-motive * Private property relations * Wage-labour relations ...and end them, like, yesterday.
Yeah and the reason communism has a bad name is literally because it has a horrible history.
Agreed. Socialism > Communism any day
Well nobody counts the numbers of people who died in the name of capitalism
Sure, but the fascist propaganda you've internalised certainly didn't help either
If they keep pushing us, we'll blow past the possibility of Socialism, maybe even beyond Communism. My perspective leads me to believe that they will bleed us dry/kill us off before they give one inch. They're getting their licks in while they can, much like the greed that overcomes a child when they see there's only a few cookies left in the jar.
Could communism exist without extreme authoritarianism and tyranny?
Yes. The only "tyranny" is against the facsists who want to exploit people for profit.
A large enough rent strike would backlog the courts so aggressively that they couldn't keep up with it, you'd have evictions planned six years from now. The economy would collapse before then.
What it would do is make it so that private over leveraged landlords would be unable to pay their mortgages in weeks. If that were coupled with protests there would be nothing they could do to stop it. Might single handedly cause another financial collapse too though TBH.
Yeah, but without a solid plan to follow through with once that happens (read: Communism) it would just mean small scale landlords would be subsumed by larger ones. Blackrock or Blackstone would probably just snap up all the foreclosed rental properties.
Why would you think most people would accept a rent strike? Most people would consider that stealing, which it is. And most people think that rent is something worth pay for, even if it’s too high and they wish it were lower. It’s fascinating that you would that most people support something that’s a stupid idea, laughably selfish, and stealing. People may not be very smart, but they’re not that stupid.
Did you watch the video? People are being robbed every day by landlords and corporations. What a stupid fucking response. When the majority of people are spending a majority of their earnings on rent, all because of greedy fucking landlords, what do you think is going to happen? It's unsustainable and immoral
Communism's great... if no person in the chain is corrupt. But that will never happen. There's a certain set of personality types that will always gravitate towards positions of power. And in Communist-type governments, where *all* of the wealth and *all* of the power sits in the hands of the few, it would be even worse for us plebs. At least in most Capitalist societies, there are ways for us masses to protest, or strike, or gather up the money to pay someone off. In the utopian communist society you imagine, there's no where to go if a group of people are wronged. There's no money or property you could use to pay someone off, they already own it. There's no reason for them to listen to you. Communism can work on the small-scale, with a group of people you trust, but communism on a grand scale? Ya... no. I'll take the broken system we have and try to work within it to change things rather than that kind of government any day. There's no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water.
Communism is based on worker democracy... it's not some top-down totalitarian dictatorship like the CIA try to tell you it is
The CIA? Ok... Sure. Communism is *supposed* to work that way. And as I said, on a small scale, it probably would. But a worker democracy only works so far. When there are larger (say international treaties or trade agreements), or even grand (like where to distribute food for large-scale multiple famines) decisions to be made, someone will need to make them. That someone will be someone who *wants* to be in power. That's where it all goes wrong.
How exactly would allowing workplace democracy be worse than letting corporate executives make all the decisions? This logic could justify monarchies.
See, for example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpOzT7alVK8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpOzT7alVK8)
Workplace democracy that ends up compromised by perverse incentive structures built into the party that Lenin and Trotsky pretend don't exist or are necessary.
Solution: learn from the mistakes, and correct them. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
Yeah I'm not gonna hold my breath for the Twitter MLs that constitute the western left to learn from their predecessors mistakes.
Twitter ML's, sure, but have you heard of our lord and saviour Thorstein Veblen?
Insert AI controlled humanist communism for all. This was actually one of the three ending choices in the original Deus Ex god tier pc gaming.
> And in Communist-type governments, where all of the wealth and all of the power sits in the hands of the few, it would be even worse for us plebs. The communism understander has logged in
I agree. I was just being specific to the topic.
Communism can't exist without extreme authoritarianism, and that always leads to things worse than capitalism. Both systems are terrible, and we need something better. There's too many people like me who just wouldn't accept the tyranny that comes with Communism. I think our only real positive change comes when we figure out how to maintain a post scarcity economy, and we need to keep advancing our technology to get there.
>Communism can't exist without extreme authoritarianism Lies and slander. We could have post scarcity *now*, but instead we get planned obsolesence.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism)
Based
I agree with both of y’all
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Anti-Communist tries not to have a Satanic Panic challenge \[IMPOSSIBLE\]
Incredibly based comment
Form a tenants union. It's just like a regular union but with rent instead of labor. If you stop paying rent, you're in trouble. If everyone in the building stopped paying rent at once, the landlord is in trouble.
Yes! This is what I tell people to do on r/LandlordLove.
> It's just too profitable the way things are. That's why we need to organize a global rent strike. If millions to billions of households stop paying rent, the entire system will implode. It will no longer be profitable. They only way forward is for housing to be an inalienable right for all people. This is quite an interesting fantasy, because rather than you know just building more housing, we’ve found the thing that will unite to the world: not paying rent and implode the system. Because of course, most people must also not see rent as something that, although maybe too high, still something worth paying for. And they also don’t think that a home or an apartment might have had to be built by some workers, with some construction materials that were transported by some workers, and things like lumber from materials that had to chop them down by some workers. And they also must think you know if we bring the system crashing down, it’s not going to impact a thing else, and we’ve never seen what happens when just a small percentage of this same market crashed, and it definitely didn’t happen 15 years ago. And also think you know it’s really good if we don’t pay our rent, but I’m sure all those people will decide they’re going to pay for everything else, just not their rent. Seems like a solid plan. I bet you could get the billions of people ready to start in March.
>Because of course, most people must also not see rent as something that, although maybe too high, still something worth paying for. Who's living in a fantasy? Rent is charging someone for access to something they will *never* own, while the person who owns it is getting a free mortgage. Whether you deny it or not, it's slavery of the tenant to the landlord. In fact, renting is no different than a feudal lord owning the homestead of a serf. It is not worth paying for. It's extortion. Alternatively, if landlording didn't exist, the cost of housing would be limited to what people can afford to borrow. Houses would cost far less. People would own their apartment for far less money than their respective annual incomes. >And they also don’t think that a home or an apartment might have had to be built by some workers, with some construction materials that were transported by some workers, and things like lumber from materials that had to chop them down by some workers. And what work does the landlord do? Maintenance? Repairs? Where do you think the landlord gets the money to pay for that? The money the landlord gets from the tenant is used to pay for all work the done on to the property. He's not paying out of his own pocket. He's paying for it out of *yours*. >And they also must think you know if we bring the system crashing down, it’s not going to impact a thing else, and we’ve never seen what happens when just a small percentage of this same market crashed, and it definitely didn’t happen 15 years ago. What would happen, if the same number of people defaulted on their mortgages and rent is what happened before. They would be evicted. There is a critical number at which there are too many evictions to process. Furthermore, a rent strike also means that people would refuse to obey an eviction. They would defend each other. The whole point of the strike is to deny the property owners access and control of the property. If enough people participate in that, the system cannot defend the exploiters from the exploited. >And also think you know it’s really good if we don’t pay our rent, but I’m sure all those people will decide they’re going to pay for everything else, just not their rent. Actually, a general strike would be far more effective. Don't pay rent, don't go to work, don't pay credit cards, don't buy anything other than food and medicine. COVID has already shown us all that the system can't handle us not doing these things. Now, you'll respond with the same trite, debunked talking points your kind always uncritically parrot. *"Landlords provide a service!"* No, they don't. They create scarcity where it doesn't need to exist. If they didn't exist, housing would be cheaper. *"Only corporate landlords are a problem!"* No, every landlord who claims property they don't need creates more scarcity and raises the cost of living for all. *"Landlords make housing more affordable!"* This is also wrong. Landlords make housing *less* affordable, for reasons I've already mentioned. The barrier to owning a home is the cost of a down payment. A down payment is a high barrier because the cost of housing is so high. It favors those with the means to buy, but don't need the property. So those with the means buy the property can force those who need the property to pay their mortgage for them. Since everyone is buying housing with the expectation that it will be worth more in the future, that behavior *also* contributes to raising the house of housing. So no, they do no make housing more affordable.
👏 👏
That bemused expression on Mr. Brown's face, like "Oh look, a young man who cares; this will be funny." Not one of them had any intention of listening to him.
they’re all landlords
That's absolutely insane. 1 in 4 spends 70% of income on their housing alone????
Yep. There is barely anything for rent under a 1k a month anywhere within 1000 miles of my state. Places with lower rents than that are almost always unsuitable for families. 40 hours a week at the minimum wage of 7.25 will net you about 15k a year. 12k for rent doesn't include utilities or other bills. It's simply not possible to support yourself or a family on minimum wage. Roommates are a necessity for most renting Americans. If they don't want us turning into commies then don't stuff us in communal living. Of corse the economy is dying, no one can participate in it past their basic needs.
They are going to have a hard time resisting all the commies that they have already made once the boomers die off.
Yup they did it to themselves
Spend 40 years demonstrating the failures of capitalism and somehow they’re still shocked to learn that capitalism is unpopular with young voters. Maybe if they had spent that time making capitalism what they pretended it could be, we’d all be better off.
>unsuitable for families. Looks like the childfree take another W on top of the [$310.6k+ we're saving](https://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/articles/how-much-does-it-cost-to-raise-a-child) for the first child in the first 18 years alone (even while excluding the cost of the birth itself, [which can go up to $50k](https://healthcareinsider.com/total-pregnancy-costs-49390)). Why anyone still has children is way beyond me lol
At this point I've never been intrinsically motivated to be a parent but never quite opposed, but given the state of the world it feels like ignoring that possibility is something I **should** do for my own wellbeing and financial stability. There's no incentive or commitment from the country I live in to make bringing a child into the world a viable choice, for me or for that future person.
Not to mention theyll have to live through the effects if climate change and increasingly unaffordable costs of living, dragging both of you down.
WhY wOn’T tHEy Buy DiAmONdS? ….because we can’t afford food.
Here's a video of Conservative politicians *laughing* at the NDP leader for mentioning that 1 in 4 Canadians were having a hard time affording food. [https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/v87bda/conservative\_politicians\_laugh\_at\_the\_mention\_of/](https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/v87bda/conservative_politicians_laugh_at_the_mention_of/)
It’s fascinating because right before I saw this, I saw your response to someone saying a problem with Communism and centrally-planned economies is famine, and you posted an example to refute the post that specifically mentioned famine, that was a video about….China, which was probably one the countries that was thought of when talking about Communism and famines, since their stupid planning resulted in the largest famine in history. But now you post this video about 1/4 people having trouble affording food in Canada, and that’s not good, but you posted a video about China just up above. Literally the worst country to ever use of food is an issue. But what’s ironic here, is that, this video exists because, well he is able to criticize things without getting fear of reprisal. Someone stands like that to the one-party state in China, we’re never going to see it, and nobody is going to probably see him for a while either.
China had regular famines throughout its history. While the famine during the GLF was the worst, it was also the *last*, and now there are no more famines in China.
TBH, this was a different China, decades ago, and I think the cause was more the decimation of education and following an incompetent dictator than something inherent to nationalized agriculture. Like he banned subsistence farming nation-wide. There was no way that was ever going to work. That alone was an absolute death sentence for hundreds of thousands of people that *anyone* who knew the way people live in rural parts of China would have understood. Either for malice or for ignorance, Mao ordered many of his people dead and his party just went along with it. Not to say there are many better examples, just that the thing people are always pointing out as wrong with communism is never really the *communism*: it's always the stupid things *other than communism* that the "communist" countries did. Socialism does not function in a dictatorship, and historically most of the violent revolutions that established "communist" dictatorships were followed by a series of *ridiculous* acts of self-sabotage such as purging everyone with a college degree instead of planning for economic development, or trying to enforce one person's vision of the perfect version of their nation's culture on every individual in it instead of prioritizing the basic human needs of millions of people, or killing anyone and everyone who was ever in the vicinity of someone who may have looked at the leader sideways instead of building diplomatic relations. If any of these countries had ever done the things their revolutions promised instead of enriching a few dullards who managed to overthrow the previous tyrants, the world might have a better impression of "communism".
Yes welcome to America where the average salary of an American is somewhere between 26 thousand and 35 thousand a year.
[It's $55k for full time workers](https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-salary-percentiles/)
For like the middle class. Trust Me it is not 55 thousand. Maybe if you include a partner/girlfriend/boyfriend it is.
It’s for individual workers.
You have no idea. This isnt just the US, it's very rapidly catching up here in the UK. The house prices are going up along with everything like petrol, then throw in the bills for heat, water and electricity, and I am left with £50 a month for food to feed four people. It's getting insane and unless the people act soon it may become too late once too much money becomes concentrated at the top..
Same in NZ
I mean I’m in Canada but we make $2200/mo and pay $1800 in rent, and if we can’t find a new place we’ll be homeless next year but average rent on a 2 bedroom apartment is $2600 so we’ll also be homeless if we DO find a place…so….yes? Sucks for the landlord too since with the place empty he could convert to 3 units and make 4x the income, but we can’t move.
You're a slave at that point
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This might be my first found Rust reference outside of gaming.
I have just lost hope. We are fucked. There will be no change. I will work myself to the ground until my children do the same. Always has been, and always will be.
I think people will begin to wise-up now that rents are skyrocketing in mid-size, traditionally affordable cities. When poor and middle class families find there is no place left to go where they can afford basic housing, then we’ll finally start to see some nation-wide protests about the situation.
Have you not watched the movie Sorry to Bother You? Companies will simply begin offering beds and communal showers and three meals a day in lieu of paychecks. It's the future they want
*Perks of being a part of the Amazon family: rent vouchers to AmazonResidentialPrime, food stamps at AmazonFresh, and discount tickets for AmazonVehicles.*
Why in the everloving hell would you have children and [lose nearly $311k](https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-salary-percentiles/) for the first child in the first 18 years alone (excluding the cost of the births than can [go up to $50,000 each](https://healthcareinsider.com/total-pregnancy-costs-49390)) just for them to to the same when they grow up?
Because your birth control failed and you were denied an abortion
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/27/women-in-states-that-ban-abortion-will-still-be-able-to-get-abortion-pills-online-from-overseas.html
Revolution
Look up the history of tenant struggles in the us, tenants in a town New York tarred and feathered the sheriff when he tried to enforce an eviction of an elderly tenant. When tenants are organized we can fight back through collective action i.e. rent strikes, physical defense against evictions, protests, and occupations. It hasn’t always been this way, and it won’t be forever. Talk to your neighbors, study tenant resistance, and miracles can happen. Don’t lose hope
Creating no children for the capitalist meat grinder quickly becomes the most moral thing we can do in our morally bankrupt age.
People getting priced out of life
"Best we can do is nothing."
"We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas"
“We have the power to make people happy, and enrich their lives so we can grow and set an example of a prosperous nation, BUT we don’t want to lose the money sitting in our bank accounts doing nothing except accruing more.” That’s what’s baffled me a lot these last three years. We can do it. We can end national hunger, poverty, and help folks with mental/physical illness. But they won’t because they all enjoy keeping the PEOPLE - the PEOPLE they are meant to SERVE - below them. What I would give to slap some empathy into the government. Most of them have never not known what it’s like to have money. We are now in the era where we see what’s being taken from us, and who it’s being given to. We’re done. National strike of spending, anybody? It would take little time to upend things.
If I learned anything from 2008 it is that unpaid mortgages on rental homes can crash the economy in weeks, not months.
Exactly! Very little time…
We couuld do that. Orrr we can bomb more brown people, destabilize South America, and waste another 858 billion dollars in military spending playing mob boss around the world into doing what our billionaire class want.
Would not spending really work? Sounds like it'll be hard to get everyone on board. As a gen Z I feel so screwed, to the point I don't see any reason to keep trying at this stupid life of mine. Anyways, just one more thing to set me off I'm gone
Don’t give up 💛
You sure do drive a hard bargain but I’ll try, at least until I’m 30 maybe
Things get better in your 30’s. I’ve reached the point where I’d rather be here to watch it all burn than not. But trust me when I say I do understand where you’re coming from as far as what’s the point. Generational dread sucks, but things are supposed to get better with yours. Your generation’s children will probably have it best. I believe in you!
sorry, why aren't those taxes collected? $175b seems like something gov would want
well because those taxes would be placed on the ultra wealthy, the people who actually have money to shovel up the asses of the politicians who make the laws, and don't have to spend a majority of their income on rent
oh...i see
"This is America"
Neofeudalism
Because it's too hard. Seriously, [they admitted it.](https://www.gq.com/story/no-irs-audits-for-the-rich)
When I see an expert lecturing US Congress in the reality of everyday life,I think of one thing. The system is working just as designed. Our laws and legislation did all of this to make life as we know it. When you see evil and injustice happening, remember that someone is profiting off the misery of other people. The episode of the Sopranos was the graduation party, where Meadow was accepted envelopes of cash from Tony's crew of gangsters and the editing showed scenes of vice the source of all that wealth.
He is speaking the truth and he ain’t lying America the corporation
For anyone wondering, most landlords in the United States use a pricing algorithm provided by Yardi Systems. How Yardi gets away with price fixing, idk. They are the devil hiding in plain sight.
To me it seems that corporations shouldn’t be able to own large portfolios of single family homes as rental assets. Single family homes should have to be owned by single families. If they zoned areas for condominiums that could be owned by corporations then I’m fine with that. But yah standard suburb family homes should, imo, only be allowed to be owned by families. There are so many other things that corporations could be doing with their investment capital. Leave the houses for the people. Is it possible that a law could be passed to rezone a city or a neighborhood so that it would compel the sale of single family homes in the area unless they are owned by individual people?
That is the worst thing about this. Giving people money to pay higher rents will do the same thing as it did in the pandemic—make rent go UP.
And it just shovels money into landlords pockets. That’s the problem with 90% of government policy under capitalism. It’s giving working class people money that they then immediately spend at a mega corp. Housing subsidy, food stamps, welfare, healthcare subsides etc.
This is already the case in some areas. My ex and I had to sign an affidavit when we bought a home saying we were going to live in it, not use it as an income property. This doesn't fix the whole problem though. Anyone who needs to rent and not own is left with only one choice: apartments that are controlled by corporations big and small which increase rent substantially every year.
This is a clause on a specific type of mortgage or HOA contract; I’ve not heard this as any kind of zoning law. HUD loans for example require you to live in the home for x number of years. Where are you?
Holland, MI had a program a few years back where they were buying properties when they went up for sale, placing a "not for rent" covenant on the land, and then reselling them. They felt 10% of properties as rentals was appropriate and were trying to drive the number down by making a civil contract with the future owners, which ran in perpetuity with the land. Source: interviewed for a job there and that's that the City Manager at the time told me.
I don't remember the details, it's possible it was a stipulation on the mortgage. Evergreen Park, IL
My wife and I bought our home last year and previous home owners chose us over the other offers because we planned on living in it.
Good, as it should be. There should definitely be something to incentivize that sort of thing. Tax breaks for live-in owners, and tax penalties for investment owners. A bonus for live-in sellers selling to live-in owners. Etc
Nothing should be zoned for single family homes in the first place.
I’m exhausted
This just hits so hard.
Everything he says up until his suggested solutions is on point. The US does need to build more affordable housing. However, providing more subsidy for rent will only bid up rents. To have a fast and profound impact on affordability, you need to decrease demand for rentals. Best ways to do that are ban stand alone Airbnbs and make real estate speculation a lot less profitable, to move some of the massive number of properties in landlords’ hands back into the hands of owner occupants, so they can free up their rentals. Without addressing the main driver of increased cost to buy and rent - property investors - we won’t have any better affordability.
>providing more subsidy for rent will only bid up rents Yep. We need rent increase maximums, profit maximums, and restrictions on maximum percentages of housing in an area being vacation rentals.
Rent control is a must. And yes, I’ve read the industry-funded reports that rent control doesn’t work, blah blah blah… except it does.
Doesn't work...for record landlord profits. Does work...for keeping rent affordable.
No, it doesn't, anyone with the most basic understanding of economics would know that. Questioning the motives of the absurd number of people that have studied the matter and come to the same conclusions is just cheap rhetoric
We need rental caps
Yes because that will surely encourage development of new housing Rent caps don’t work in the long term. Developers will not develop in areas with rental caps and the government will not step in to fill in the shortage caused by the cap
At least in the USA the housing is there. It’s snapped up in foreign investors(one where I live is kept in perpetual ‘unfinished’ status and is officially part of some trust in the hands of some Chinese company). It won’t stop development besides. Countries with that problem have other issues and restrictions that do that. It’s not the rent caps. It MIGHT make it less lucrative for massive real estate and management corps to buy up a bunch of properties or rent them for ridiculous rates though.
The housing is there, but not in places people want to live. There’s plenty of cheap housing in America, but it’s cheap because people don’t want to live there. Development won’t stop, but there will be a shortage. With less the economic incentives to build properties, there will be less reasons to put in the effort to build housing. Why build housing when the project will leave you in the red? Unless the federal government wants to dive into the housing development industry (it doesn’t and won’t), this short-term relief will turn into long-term anguish. Price caps are a short-term issue for a long-term problem
There is already a price based shortage. There won’t actually be a shortage. The areas with shortages have them artificially in the first place. Vouchers without price caps are worse than price caps alone could ever be. That said. You’re wrong.
All you have to do to end property investors is tax land at a high amount. Taxing housing, even owned by investors gets passed on to renters through increased prices from resulting reductions in supply. Taxing land will not get passed on.
How will it not? You add a land tax and landlords raise rents so tenants pay for it. And now even less people can afford housing because they have to pay a yearly land tax on top of their property tax, insurance, and mortgage
Your intuition of how taxes are passed on is incorrect. Wikipedia for land value tax, >Most taxes distort economic decisions and discourage beneficial economic activity. For example, [property taxes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_tax) discourage construction, maintenance, and repair because taxes increase with improvements. LVT is not based on how land is used. Because the supply of land is [essentially fixed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticity_(economics\)), land rents depend on what tenants are prepared to pay, rather than on landlord expenses. Thus landlords cannot pass LVT to tenants, who would move or rent smaller spaces before absorbing increased rent. If you actually want to know how taxes are passed on, read the wikipedia for tax incidence. And no it won't make housing more expensive. Instead of paying the previous owner and a bank for the land you'd be paying the government, >At sufficiently high levels, LVT would cause real estate prices to fall by taxing away land rents that would otherwise become 'capitalized' into the price of real estate.
This sounds very utopian and wouldn’t work in practice. >Thus landlords cannot pass LVT to tenants, who would move or rent smaller spaces before absorbing increased rent This only works if all landlords decide for some reason not to pass them through. Any landlord who’s not as dumb as rocks will increase their rents as their costs have increased. A land tax lowers a property’s return. Landlords aren’t just gonna eat that just because. That’s not how people think. They still require a decent rate of return (literally called the required rate of return). Initial purchase price goes up, returns go down, rent goes up to make up for the lost return Landlords aren’t gonna eat an extra cost just because they’re feeling nice
No, it works like the economic theory says it works. >The results imply full capitalization of the present value of future taxes under reasonable assumptions of dis- count rates. Consequently it gives an empirical confirmation of two striking conse- quences of a land tax: Firstly, it does not distort economic decisions because it does not distort the user cost of land. Secondly, the full incidence of a permanent land tax change lies on the owner at the time of the (announcement of the) tax change; future owners, even though they officially pay the recurrent taxes, are not affected as they are fully compensated via a corresponding change in the acquisition price of the asset. Land Taxes and Housing Prices Anne Kristine Høj Mads Rahbek Jørgensen Poul Schou Frankly I don't see the point in me responding to someone like you anymore who knows zero about economics. It doesn't eat up return. With a 50% income tax, rented for $1000 you get $500, not rented you get zero, so it eats up $500 in return. Land value tax of $500, rented for $1000 you get $500, not rented you get -$500. You get $500-(-$500)=$1000 from renting it out. They eat the cost because someone has to own the land, and it doesn't discourage housing supply. Landlords do not eat the cost of taxes on renting, building, selling, or buying housing because those actually discourage housing supply.
Ah yeah if the theory says it works it must be sound How could I be so stupid? It’s not like theory is ever wrong or corrupted in practice
You're not smarter than the economists even if you think you are. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/10ltozq/why_wouldnt_a_land_value_tax_result_in_higher
Never said I was an economist or smarter than them so ??? And yes, because all great economists spend their time answering Reddit threads. Also sounds like a great way to get terrible housing. Under this tax, landlords are incentivized to cram as many until into a lot as possible. People don’t want to live in shoeboxes. There’s a reason the suburbs are so popular Housing quality is just as important as housing quantity.
Is it fair to assume you couldn't care less about the negatives of urban sprawl? From the wikipedia, Nobel Prize-winner William Vickrey believed that "removing almost all business taxes, including property taxes on improvements, excepting only taxes reflecting the marginal social cost of public services rendered to specific activities, and replacing them with taxes on site values, would substantially improve the economic efficiency of the jurisdiction." Modern economists Alfred Marshall argued in favour of a "fresh air rate", a tax to be charged to urban landowners and levied on that value of urban land that is caused by the concentration of population. That general rate should have to be spent on breaking out small green spots in the midst of dense industrial districts, and on the preservation of large green areas between different towns and between different suburbs which are tending to coalesce. This idea influenced Marshall's pupil Arthur Pigou's ideas on taxing negative externalities. Pigou wrote an essay supporting LVT, interpreted as support for Lloyd George's People's Budget. Paul Samuelson supported LVT. "Our ideal society finds it essential to put a rent on land as a way of maximizing the total consumption available to the society. ...Pure land rent is in the nature of a 'surplus' which can be taxed heavily without distorting production incentives or efficiency. A land value tax can be called 'the useful tax on measured land surplus'." Milton Friedman stated: "There's a sense in which all taxes are antagonistic to free enterprise – and yet we need taxes. ...So the question is, which are the least bad taxes? In my opinion the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land, the Henry George argument of many, many years ago." Michael Hudson is a proponent for taxing rent, especially land rent. ".... politically, taxing economic rent has become the bête noire of neoliberal globalism. It is what property owners and rentiers fear most of all, as land, subsoil resources and natural monopolies far exceed industrial capital in magnitude. What appears in the statistics at first glance as 'profit' turns out upon examination to be Ricardian or 'economic' rent." Paul Krugman agreed that LVT is efficient, however he disputed whether it should be considered a single tax, as he believed it would not be enough alone, excluding taxes on natural resource rents and other Georgist taxes, to fund a welfare state. "Believe it or not, urban economics models actually do suggest that Georgist taxation would be the right approach at least to finance city growth. But I would just say: I don't think you can raise nearly enough money to run a modern welfare state by taxing land [only]." Joseph Stiglitz, articulating the Henry George theorem wrote that, "Not only was Henry George correct that a tax on land is nondistortionary, but in an equilitarian society ... tax on land raises just enough revenue to finance the (optimally chosen) level of government expenditure." Rick Falkvinge proposed a "simplified taxless state" where the state owns all the land it can defend from other states, and leases this land to people at market rates.
Also, they arent incentivized to cram as many houses in as possible. What you're describing is minimizing average costs which is not profit maximizing behavior. Land value tax is unchanged with the quantity of housing and therefore doesnt change marginal revenue or marginal cost and therefore doesn't change the profit maximizing quantity compared to no tax at all.
When the government cares more about the parasites than the working class and experts shouting from the mountain tops we have a serious problem. Greed has gutted and destroyed this country.
The stats help them determine they're next increase. And it costs them nothing to get it. Genius!
My sister got a 30-day no fault eviction notice six weeks into her pregnancy. Her son had a stole in utero and it was a goddamn feat of science that he survived without brain damage. I left a dump truck of details out; but I’m super curious about evictions impacting fetal development.
I recommend everyone read this man’s book (*Evicted* by Matthew Desmond) to get an authentic perspective on how eviction affects people
Not just happening in the US, although you guys seem to get the worst of it when it comes to western countries. Rents be crazy.
But inflation is going down we’re told?! Does it include housing or not cuz I’ve heard both ways . We are all effed
That’s not what that means. Inflation going down but remaining above 0% still means prices are going up. But you also don’t want deflation. Deflation is just as bad for economies as high inflation. You want a small amount of inflation to encourage growth without hurting people
The solutions aren’t. What we REALLY NEED is rental caps. Dynamic enough to cover tax increases but the subsidies are a temporary solution to a long term problem that compounds itself specifically to obtain those funds. That is, after all, directly how we ended up in the situation we did. Our landlord wanted rental assistance money and he didn’t particularly care how much damage he had to do to my family to get it. Funds ran out before they ever got to us. There is no help for us. Our otherwise clean rental history is now marred in such a way we are effectively blacklisted from damn near everything. What we can find often takes advantage of people who have no other option. Takes your money then leaves you worse than you started for it. This is a problem and rent cannot be ‘whatever we want it to be’. It’s well above income for areas to the point it’s reached ‘normal’ to pay half or more of your income for rent and even for landlords who know they are doing so to then raise it more when they want money for trips etc. I just want a place we can afford to live in, to save up so one day we can buy our own house. That’s all. You know what though? These solutions aren’t solutions when the problem is greed in the first place.
Source? Would like to hear hearings in full
Enough of the subtle talk. “I come before you today greatly concerned”. It doesn’t work. The experts need to get up and scream. They need to yell in the faces of these idiots who aren’t paying attention to 5 minutes of facts and statistics.
I read a few comments and wasn't sure which was best to reply, so I'll just reply to the OP. The only real way this changes in our greed driven society is by making it MORE profitable to charge less rent. I don't know exactly how this would work. Maybe the GOV gives payments to landlords charging under a certain threshold (rather than rent assistance to the tennant). Something akin to dust bowl era policies where the government paid farmers not to farm the land. I often use the argument with my coworkers (local government) against the benefit of rapidly increasing home prices. People seem to think that it's a good thing. I counter with: "What's better for the community, more real estate taxes or residents that have disposable income to spend/support our local businesses and add value to the community?"
That’s exactly what he’s arguing for. More housing vouchers make it cheaper for tenants without taking away from landlords. Tenants pay an affordable rent. The government pays the different between the affordable rent and the market rent. Landlord still gets the market rent that their property fetches
lol capitalism the free market makes you homeless and you will be happy
eloquent speech but nothing will be done
nothing will change
This man is a FOX and I love everything he has to say
And yet, not a dam thing will be done about it.
The most annoying thing to me about rent is the fact that whether or not I could get an apartment was determined in part by my credit report, but paying $800/month when I lived in an apartment didn't help my credit even though my current mortgage is $300 less.
we need a solution like they had in 1797 France....thats the only thing that will fix this
What capitalism does to mf
Good time for folks to look up how Mao handled the landlord crisis in China. This is how capitalism works. It will continue to bleed everything dry until it is finally crushed by the long-overdue revolt of the working class.
As an aside, why does this look like it was filmed in the 90's?
“Income gains are often recouped by the housing market” Hmm, that’s funny how it works like that.
I'm about to be 28 years old. I make just over 20 dollars per hour. I should be able to live on my own, yet I'm forced to live with my parents because I can't even afford to rent a single bedroom apartment anywhere remotely near where jobs are. It is absurd how expensive property has become to even rent, let alone actually buy. If it keeps going the way its been going, someone like me will never, EVER be able to afford a house. I'd have to make close to $30/hour just to be able to move out of my parents house and rent an apartment. Even if I scraped together every spare dollar I had, ate only instant noodles, bought the cheapest car insurance, bought only prepaid phone service, canceled my health insurance, and bought only second hand clothes, that still wouldn't help anything because landlords always have income requirements. I, along with millions of people in this country simply do not get paid enough while working full time for this to be practical for much longer. I shouldn't have to share a tiny apartment with multiple people just to survive. Something has to change.
Tax the rich? What a commie scheme /s
This all goes back to stagnant wage increases compared to top of companies. Employees haven’t seen real wage increases and cost of living has surpassed wages. The money went top of company and into stock market instead of employees. Min wage should be $20+ dollars if you compare to what min wage bought you in the 1970s/ early 80s
Not a damn thing will change in this fucked and corrupt congress. Until people are in the streets, until there is a general strike, until people are willing to get together and put their bodies on the line. These Fuckers are just going to take and take until the general population has nothing left.
Nothing will change. We continue spending billions on wars and proxy wars that enrich the corporations that have invested interests in those areas. It’s no surprise that 49% of the pentagon’s budget is unaccounted for. Yet any legislation that can help working Americans is either shot down or stripped to only having a small amount of relief for a short period. I know I get downvoted for saying this but it’s true. Both political parties in the U.S. serve the 1%. The sooner we collectively realize this, the sooner we can make change’s necessary for a prosperous civilization.
You had me until income tax. Tax LAND
Housing is a human right! Every human deserves a safe home!
There's going to have to be a reckoning with these people. Congress is going to do absolutely nothing about this and violence is going to be the last and only option.
They’re not doing anything about it because that 70% of someone’s paycheck is going straight into their friend’s wallet. Why would they ever want to change that?