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Comment by amrocha | Hacker News Reader

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.

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