> And while the governent largely paid most.of this grifter's rent, my family member was still out over 15k in lost rent and legal fees.
Not "the government". Taxpayers. Taxpayers bailed out rent seekers.
> you'll see a lot of small, private landlords get out, only to leave large corporate landlords who will have much stricter rental policies.
If this were to happen, it would be a good thing. Consolidation erodes the electoral base of rent seekers, which makes Georgist policies much easier to implement.
> > you'll see a lot of small, private landlords get out, only to leave large corporate landlords who will have much stricter rental policies.
> If this were to happen, it would be a good thing.
Doubtful. For one thing, renting from individuals is far more pleasant than renting from giant housing conglomerates. With an individual landlord everything is negotiable and flexible, it's a person you can talk to. When renting from a corporation, there are strict rules enforced by teams of lawyers and zero flexibility.
> Consolidation erodes the electoral base of rent seekers
You got that exactly backwards. Yes, there are more individuals renting out their single properties each, but those are ordinary people who have no lawyers and no lobbyists and they don't have any coordinated voice and no influence with politicians.
The more rental properties are consolidated to giant corporations, the more outsized their influence in congress becomes as they can afford an army of lobbyists to bend the laws ever more in their favor.
Depends on the individual you are renting from. I learned the hard way to never have a lawyer for a landlord. Landlords shouldn’t be allowed to represent themselves (too bad it’s a constitutional right!). Anyway, come to find out the guy set the deposit amount specifically to make it just enough that even if you went to court to get it back, you’d never get it back because that’s how much you’d spend to get it back.
After randomly running into his ex-wife at a party and hearing that it was all done on purpose, we started to put together a class action with all of his past tenants. Then we moved to the EU instead.
> Doubtful. For one thing, renting from individuals is far more pleasant than renting from giant housing conglomerates. With an individual landlord everything is negotiable and flexible, it's a person you can talk to. When renting from a corporation, there are strict rules enforced by teams of lawyers and zero flexibility.
I've had the exact opposite experience.
> You got that exactly backwards. Yes, there are more individuals renting out their single properties each, but those are ordinary people who have no lawyers and no lobbyists and they don't have any coordinated voice and no influence with politicians.
"Rent seeking" is a very specific economics term which has nothing to do with landlords. In fact, in this scenario, the tenants exploiting government restrictions to capture the landlord's value were the ones engaged in rent-seeking.
The first sentence of the link you posted shows that the GP used the term correctly:
> Rent seeking (or rent-seeking) is an economic concept that occurs when an entity seeks to gain added wealth without any reciprocal contribution of productivity.
Landlords produce nothing. They don't provide housing; builders do. All landlords do is hoard housing and get other people to pay their mortgages. They literally want to get paid for owning stuff.
Anyone who has said that "landlords produce nothing" have never been a landlord (and, honestly, I'm not sure they've ever owned a house either).
And I can say this as someone who is a homeowner. I hate owning a house, and I loved renting. There is a ton of work to do maintaining a house, and it's not really a job I want - I've got a job, and I don't want another one. With renting, if anything is broken, anything needs maintenance - not my problem. Also, if I want to move, I just leave when my lease is up. No need to go through the entire house sales process (which, obviously is quite easy these days, but obviously it's not always like that, and it's rarely like that everywhere - plenty of people have been "locked" into their homes by declining neighborhood values).
I'm certainly not saying my approach fits for everyone, but saying "Landlords produce nothing" is just false. While land may be an appreciating asset, homes themselves fall apart over time and need lots of upkeep and maintenance.
There's a trivial way to check whether or not a landlord is a rent seeker: offer to pay the bill for a mutually agreeable all-inclusive property management service in lieu of rent.
At the very least, they do maintain housing. It takes constant upkeep and updating to keep a structure in decent condition. Unless they're a slum lord, which isn't the most sustainable business model.
Some landlords rehab a completely unlivable structure into something livable. That's something too.
I am a renter and I hesitate to own my home because of the upkeep costs and responsibility. So I subscribe to shelter-as-a-service.
Yes, landlords maintain housing. So do homeowners who live in their homes. If anything, homeowners have more incentive to properly maintain their property than landlords, because they live there. Maintaining things properly often costs more money than doing the type of "good enough" repair that a landlord would be tempted to do because it's less money out of their pocket. So, if anything, "landlords maintain housing" is an argument against landlords.
The point is that "landlords maintain housing," along with "landlords pay property taxes" and other such statements are at best a wash. Those things would happen anyway, no matter who owned the housing.
Yup. What a homeowner does to maintain their home is a nontrivial amount of work and cost, so if a landlord does it they should charge a nonzero price for that service, right?
Or are you saying they shouldn't be 'competing' with homeowners at all? In my experience a landlord is not willing to buy at the same price point as an owner occupier, as they are less emotional about the property.
I used to be a landlord and didn't enjoy it much, so nowadays I own paper (stocks, notes) and literally do nothing.
The residents are no better off paying a landlord to pay for repairs than they are paying for them themselves. That's ridiculous. How does paying an inflated price for the same "service" I can do for myself by picking up a phone benefit me?
To be clear, I am saying landlords should not exist, at least not as they do now. They're the equivalent of scalpers for housing.
The landlord providing the tenant with shelter (and the labor of maintaining that shelter, fronting the capital for the ownership of the shelter, insuring the shelter, assuming the risks associated with ownership, etc) is in fact a "reciprocal contribution of productivity". He is engaged in collecting rents, but he is not rent-seeking, which is the process of capturing value without providing anything of economic value in return. The exchange of money between landlord and tenant results in a net economic gain for both parties, and is therefore not rent-seeking, while the tenant exploiting government restrictions on evictions to capture shelter without providing a reciprocal contribution is engaged in rent-seeking (specifically, he is seeking the landlord's rents!)
If you read past the first sentence of the article it explains this quite clearly.
What really happened was that taxpayers (read: People who earn and save money and hold some property) bailed out the people who took an opportunity to skip out on paying rent, and took a hit anyway, while their renters were getting all kinds of other free handouts in taxpayer subsidies. Great. So maybe we need some wealth redistribution. But cheering the consolidation of the rental market in the hands of corporations is like snickering evil. You're advocating for the destruction of the middle class. I guess it would make revolution an easier sell. But you know what else could make you happy? Joining the middle class, buckling up and saving money, taking the hard part of it without feeling like a constant victim, and stop wasting your time trying to destroying the wealth people spend their lives working for. Harming other people to bring them down really isn't going to elevate anyone, and you know it. Rooting for the middle class to be destroyed for your own personal satisfaction is greedy, indolent and ultimately self destructive.
[edit: It's sad to see you channeling your grievance into something that will only keep you down.]
Pffft - lmao. So everyone should be equally poor? Have you read no history? The only thing the Soviet Union was attempting to do by building socialism was to turn illiterate serfs into a "middle class". The actual, successful construction of a middle class via market capitalism turned out to be the most successful experiment in human human history to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, eradicate famine and plagues, and create almost universal literacy. The very fact that you have the words and "thoughts" with which to question bourgeois society speaks to the great pains your forebears went to to make sure you weren't a slave peasant, and that's what you want to go back to? Shame on ya.
Not "the government". Taxpayers. Taxpayers bailed out rent seekers.
> you'll see a lot of small, private landlords get out, only to leave large corporate landlords who will have much stricter rental policies.
If this were to happen, it would be a good thing. Consolidation erodes the electoral base of rent seekers, which makes Georgist policies much easier to implement.
But it won't happen, because...
> long term rental