Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

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> We're going to have to have a cultural shift towards housing as shelter, not investment.

I've been saying this for years.

Real estate investing is an absolute cancer on society. It is utterly unreal to me that people think their house should go up in value over time higher than the rate of inflation without doing any improvements.

But it's not even just that, but people and corporations buying up houses for the sole purpose of renting them out, which merely furthers wealth inequality. The owners are financial vampires, taking advantage of the fact that a bank will tell someone "We don't think you can afford a $2,000/month mortgage" when their current rent is $2,500/month.

I think what upsets me the most isn't the widening inequality, but that so many of these landlords have a savior complex, thinking they're doing a huge service. No, you took a home off the market for the sole purpose of enriching yourself. The demand for rental properties pushes house prices up, locking more people out of home ownership.

We need severe disincentives for purchasing single family homes for the purpose of renting them out.

I'm sure someone is going to accuse me of being a sour renter, but nope. I've owned my house since 2015. In 2019, I could have bought a second house to rent out, but I chose not to because it's incredibly immoral.

I totally agree with this stance. Among my peer group a couple of folks own a second property they rent out and the "if we didn't where would our tenant live?" vibe is bizarre. They'd live in a house, maybe even being able to afford the one you rent to them.

Nah, they'd live in a house that they rent from Blackrock. Possibly at a lower rent due to reduced demand without small landlords in the fray, and due to a lower cost of financing for Blackrock, but it'd take actually banning residential rentals to seriously move the needle rather than just change who the landlords are.

Is this landlord savior complex common? I’ve never come across it. It’s a silly perspective even at face value.

It’s how liberals resolve the cognitive dissonance of getting someone poorer than them to pay for their mortgage, without seeing themselves as greedy or parasitic.

I don't really know what this means, I'm not American. I would say that all these people are more right of centre if liberal means left wing.

In America, "Liberal" can mean different things depending on where you sit on the spectrum.

If you divide the spectrum into just left/center/right, then people on the right would label both left and center as liberal, but people on the left would label just the center as liberal. I don't know what the centrists would label as liberal because we have very few genuine centrists. Most of them are actually right-wing but don't want to admit it.

To me, a liberal is someone that sees one group of people that wants to lynch all black people, another group saying "hey we just want to live", and thinking there's a compromise that can be made. A liberal seeks to maintain the status quo and to keep things quiet and peaceful. They prioritize order over justice.

Yeah that absolutely makes no sense. As a tenant, I live in this house, it is mine no matter what paper you have that says you own it. You didn't provide it for me from the graciousness of your heart but rather from a pit of greed that gatekeeps me from doing what I see fit with it.

> Real estate investing is an absolute cancer on society.

Yes, so much so that Adam Smith himself described real estate speculators and landlords as destructive parasites, whose power and influence should be diminished at all costs. So much for that part of his philosophy, though…

The problem is a lot of people that want to purchase a home know it’s a scam and the owners of homes want to perpetuate that scam because they bought into it. Guess who has more political clout.

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