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Comment by dangerwill | Hacker News Reader

I agree, time to strip them of the assets then with 0 compensation.

I think it’s unfair you have so many assets compared to the average citizen of Cameroon. Care to redress this grave injustice?

What a stupid comparison.

Own 10 houses, all vacant, then you can either sell or rent out. Having people hoard these properties does no good for society.

So you’re hoarding resources that could help Cameroon citizens and don’t care. Got it.

You think that's such a good "gotcha", but it's just pathetic, really. Like you do so much better.

It's perfectly fine to complain about a system, without being a perfect citizen yourself. I can complain about oil companies, and still be dependent on a car.

I think the parent was saying that your claims would simply not be credible. Not that your claims are somehow physically blocked from being uttered.

> I agree, time to strip them of the assets then with 0 compensation

That’s not a complaint. It is a naked authoritarian call to steal from people who legally do things you disapprove of.

Do you give permission to people who dislike your policy positions to take away your livelihood?

Companies like Apple and Google make huge profits. That means they are clearly profiteering of the customers. We should strip the stock from their owners and set them to sell at much much lower prices. Even below cost for good of the world.

What a terrible thing to advocate.

And landlording is a terrible thing to do

As someone who is renting right now and doesn’t want to own a home currently, where would I live if not for a landlord? Government housing? What in the heck is wrong with someone renting out something that they own?

Some find it immoral, especially when the landlord has multiple properties, or when, like in the article, they hold up the apartments vacant until their conditions are satisfied. There are also people who are basically social parasites, living off of rent and the work of those who actually contribute to society.

Some find any profit immoral. That doesn’t make them right.

Isn’t holding a unit empty somewhat similar to workers striking until unjust conditions are resolved?

If the government is forcing rents to remain under inflation, eventually something will break.

Yes, government owned and managed housing. Across the more-left leaning parts of Europe this is not controversial at all. It's mostly a US/UK/Canada thing that "government housing" = "scary and full of drugs" because these governments only ever adopted policies for the very bottom of society, and then left these projects to rot over time.

OK, but that option doesn't exist here currently. So in the actual situation we're living in, are you actually saying that you think it's wrong/evil for a person to choose to invest in a rental property? IE buying a house for the purpose of renting it out? Because I know a lot of people renting and looking to rent who wish more people would do that.

Where is this happening in Europe?

That's a bit of an inane, edgelord take, no?

It's my honestly held belief that private landlords (both private individuals and even more so corporate) are systemically pushed to provide the least amount of maintenance, repair, and amenities for the most amount of money. Having a market based system for a necessity, especially when the market is allowed to get as incredibly distorted as it has (in the US and Western Europe), is a moral travesty.

I have just given up trying to be nice about this, despite HN's capitalist slant

> Having a market based system for a necessity, especially when the market is allowed to get as incredibly distorted as it has (in the US and Western Europe), is a moral travesty

Markets for food work pretty well. And for loans.

Markets are pretty efficient. That doesn’t mean you don’t regulate them.

> Markets for food work pretty well.

Please look up how much subsidy is given to the American farmers. It's probably more than you think it is.

> And for loans.

Might have agreed more with you, but then 2008 happened.

> systemically pushed to provide the least amount of maintenance, repair, and amenities for the most amount of money

That argument can literally be applied to any product or service, yet here we are.

There is a peculiar correlation I have noticed with these views - it tends to be (white) upper middle class suburban upbringing Americans that profess them. Principal agent problem of sorts, I guess.

How much property are you renting at a loss to assist others?

This take I can see, that market forces (especially in the presence of distortions like rent controls) do not provide the best result for tenants, and that better systems are possible. What I don't believe follows is that given our existing system, individual landlords are doing something wrong.

It kind of reminds me of the argument that philanthropy is bad because individual rich people shouldn't get to choose who is helped; governments should tax the rich more and use it to help people. Well yeah, I agree, they should. But if they don't, it certainly doesn't make someone a bad person for choosing to voluntarily donate to charity.

How dare some people put up the money long-term to provide housing on a short-term basis to others who need it; what assholes!

Landlords don't provide shit, the housing is already there they just charge a tenant money to use it

Think through the money flows.

  Developer buys land. Spends all their money on land and building a house. 
  Investor comes along and buys the house to rent it out.
  Developer now has money to buy another lot and build another house (and other developers notice that they can build houses and get paid to do so).

Without the investor money in step 2, developers build a lot fewer houses in steps 1 and 3.

You literally admitted it, landlords provide nothing, all they do is finance private spending. Once the property is paid for the landlord gets to keep an appreciating asset and generate cash flow from it by stealing from the tenant's paycheck. Literally leeches on society.

If the landlord isn't there to buy the house, it won't get built in the first place. Not everyone can afford to buy a house, so someone needs to provide that capital in order for the housing to exist. No one is stealing anything; the tenant is paying the landlord for the service of lending them the house to live in. The landlord is being compensated for the funds they have tied up in the house, that they can't use to invest in (buy) other things.

Like, literally, if there were no landlords, by definition there would be no rental properties. So people who couldn't afford to buy a house outright would have nowhere to live. That can't be what you're advocating?

No, if the funds to buy the resources, physical and human, to build the housing aren't there then it won't get built. There's no rule that these funds have to come from private entities trying to turn a profit on housing.

Are you really so ideologically brainwashed that you're incapable of imagining any other system that doesn't inherently exploit poor people and concentrates cash at the top???

Are you so ideologically bent on thinking that things ought to work some other way to utterly reject the reality of how things actually work right now?

If that’s the landlords what does that make the banks? They charge rent on money and money doesn’t even need maintenance!

The properties upkeep themselves too!

Landlords don't maintain properties, tradesmen do

First of all, many landlords do physically maintain properties.

Secondarily, since tradespeople tend to like food with their meals, landlords paying tradespeople is an important motivation for them to do that work.

I bought my apartment a decade ago. I needed to move to another area so I rented it out.

I regularly see these takes hn and I don't get what's so assholeish about my situation. I know that my tenant is on a temporary visa. Are we arguing that ethically he should have bought my property?

Capitalism is general is. Extracting money from others with zero labour put in. We really should socialise everything and ban private ownership.

The decades of absolute failure of that model and the need to enforce it through state violence don’t concern you?

This time it’ll work!

The sad thing is that people don’t bother digging much into it and take simple answers like “greed” instead of figuring out exactly where the monies are going.

its an effective way to remove the high value of housing and landlording, but the government also then has to take over the creation and management of housing

Maybe you should move to North Korea where the government does exactly that

Or ya know, Austria for example, a country with a better standard of living, overall happiness, and life expectancy than the US

There are many modern, developed, market economy countries where the government enacts controls to ensure access to affordable housing. The US is somewhat of an outlier in that regard.

It's the backbone of American society too, for land and housing.

The colonists certainly didn't pay the natives for their land, and the revolutionaries sure didn't pay Britain to take ownership

When land isn't being used effectively, it's moved to another owner with limited to no compensation

In the past, civilisation has been held together by the threat of violence on the landed classes. Now that is essentially no longer possible, corruption and inequality have grown unchecked.

It is a solution - "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

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