Hmm, I think large corporations should never be allowed to purchase residences though anyone is allowed to create a corporation in the US you’ll just need to declare a CEO, COO, and a treasurer. This could be a simple mom-and-pop family business with 3-4 people/employees, this could prevent a lot of normal people/small business owners struggling to create a profit from purchasing workspaces, their own home, work equipment.
no real estate taxes for the first house owned, heavy and progressive taxes starting on the second, is an idea
companies get called people all the time, i’m starting to believe it, but i still think they don’t need shelter, so they shouldn’t be able to aquire a basic human need
Up until very recently most housing in Finland was co-ops, and it’s still extremely common although many new developments are built and owned by corporations which then rent them out.
I live and own shares in a new housing co-op (proportional to the size of my apartment), and all of us together own and run the building and we’re renting the property from the city (although you can buy your share of that property off from the city if you don’t want to pay that rent.) It’s not a perfect system by any means but it’s better than corporations owning everything; ideally the people who live in a building are the ones who decide how it’s run, but of course that’s sort of gone out the window too with rich people just buying properties speculatively and to rent them out. If enough of the shareholders in a building are rent-seekers, upkeep of the building is going to go way down because they don’t live there themselves and don’t give a shit about whether it’s a nice place to live in, they care about making a profit.
Corporations don’t have to be about making tons of money. They can be about organizing people to accomplish things that they couldn’t individually. You then make money just to give those people a living wage and keeping the lights on.
This doesn’t even need to have a legal framework. Just a couple of people who agree to take up certain tasks is a company.
Fine but they shouldn’t be considered as people, lobbying should be illegal, fines can’t just be part of the business plan, money is not free speech, and if a corp is caught doing illegal activities it should go to jail or be broken up like the rest of us.
If you think about it, it is completely absurd, why anyone assumes the right to ‘own’ a piece of land. Or even more land than the other guy. Someone must have been the person to first come up with the idea of ownership, but it is and was never based on anything other than an idea, and we should question it.
After all inheritance of landownership is a major cornerstone of our unjust and exploitative society.
Every generation, people want to try new things and it’s nice. But landownership can and has been and good thing in a way that just going back to “anarchy” wouldn’t work. E.g. creation of ghettos, who gets to farm the best land, etc.
So then the suggestions are that the land are owned and “managed” by the state apparatus. Now we have a few famines in history to show us how gaining favor in a political system is not the best way to manage the land.
I’m open to better suggestions but just shitting on land ownership seems easy and unproductive.
If someone owns a house, they kinda have to own at the very least some land around it. I just don’t really see any other way for that to work. Would be interesting to hear how that could work otherwise.
There’s a thing called leasehold whereby you own the building and lease the land usually for 99 years after which it returns to the freeholder. It’s one of the reasons that the US embassy in London moved from Mayfair to Nine Elms. It was the only US embassy in the world that the US government didn’t own, the freehold belongs to the Grosvenor family (i.e. Lord Grosvenor). When the US tried to buy the freehold the Grosvenor family refused but agreed to a 999 year lease in exchange for the return of 12000 acres of Florida that was confiscated from them after the Revolutionary War - yes, they’ve been landowners for a very long time! I think the US made sure to buy the freehold of the new site at Nine Elms (they sold the remainder of the 999 year lease in Mayfair for an undisclosed sum) 😀
They grew enough potatoes to feed the population in spite of the blight losses. However said taters fetched a higher price abroad. So fuck the poor, I guess.
Also they would have had a higher diversity of crops if not for landlords. Landlords were extorting farmers and the only way the farmers could pay the bills was with the vegetable that had the highest margin. Farmers were forced to switch from other crops to growing potatoes by their landlords.
The blight affected all of Europe, yet only Ireland had severe famine because while the French government bought food for their citizens, the English government publicly declared the invisible hand of the free market would fix the famine.
Similarly the Ukraine famine was crop failure due to bad weather conditions that affected all of Eastern Europe. The crop failure wasn’t caused by the Soviets. Yet only Ukrainians died because the Soviets shipped Ukrainian food to Moscow in the same way Irish died because of free markets shipping Irish food to London. (Yes, Ireland was still a net exporter of food during the famine.)
When natural disasters occured it’s, “Millions died because of communism.” Yet when millions die under the free market it’s only the natural disaster and not capitalism.
I’m pretty sure the Native Americans didn’t believe in land ownership, at least not individual land ownership, more of a communal version, and it worked out well for them. They had huge societies, vast trade networks, and were able to feed themselves fine. It requires a different, non-capitalist, non-Western mindset, but it can work.
Define for the class what you think anarchy means, and, wait one minute, you think ghettos are created by people not recognizing private land ownership?
There’s quite a lot of thought missing from your definition of anarchy, including, ya know, all of the ideas on how to make that work, and the assumption by most that it wouldn’t be an immediate process, and for someone that knows how ghettos are created, you sure used it as a criticism of an idea that would make them literally impossible, while doubling down on insisting that the thing creating ghettos can solve the ghettos if you… Do it more, and harder?
I don’t actually believe in the dissolution of private property, at least in regards to individual land ownership. I just take issue with people stating their opinions as facts, especially when they’re just flat out wrong.
Which is rather part of the problem, as a lot of modern anarchists don’t believe in the dissolution of the state, at least as a deliberate policy, thus the idea that Marxists and anarchists are ultimately working towards the same goal (communism) and disagreeing on the methods to achieve it.
Yeah i was referring to the dissolution of property rights when referring to anarchy. It was more colloquial than the actual system. Yes I didn’t copy the wiki for anarchy because it was irrelevant.
Not sure where you took the opinion as facts thing but okay…
People like the idea of the stability ownership offers. You can’t be kicked out of your house or off your land you own because your income dropped out lost a job. How would you suggest this stability is maintained?
Unfortunately land will fall into disrepair if someone doesn’t actually own it. They have no incentive to invest in its upkeep if it can just be taken away at any moment. There’s a reason rental buildings have a reputation for being unkempt, the renters don’t want to pay for the upkeep since it’s not theirs and the landlords don’t want to pay for the upkeep because they don’t live there.
It gets even worse if government owns it, it would take 6 months just to get a light bulb changed let alone a new roof or hedges trimmed.
Because they’re paid to do so? We hired a company to build our home, and after it was complete and paid for they held no further claim on it or on the property. Why would they?
You run into a problem that you need to mitigate for this to work: qualifying for a mortgage.
A landlord can rent to you for a year–or less–and they assume the risk of you not paying and needing to evict you. Their income verification can be a lot more loose as a result. A bank is going to be in a relationship with you for 15-30 years; they want to be pretty sure that you’re going to be able to meet your financial obligations for that whole time period. As a result, they’re going to be quite a bit more strict about proof of income, etc.
Renting can be cheaper, too; a tenant isn’t on the hook for repairs to a unit, but when I need a new roof in my house, or the water heater goes out, I get to pay every penny of that myself. Yeah, the mortgage is cheaper, but just because you can afford the mortgage doesn’t mean that you can afford everything else that goes into owning a home.
You also get into weird and perverse tax and zoning incentives that can make it difficult to build any kind of affordable housing; Dems say they want affordable housing, right up until someone wants to put it in their neighborhood, then they start acting like Republicans.
Yes, the lack of affordable housing is a huge problem. But it’s not quite as black and white as it often seems.
Dems say they want affordable housing, right up until someone wants to put it in their neighborhood, then they start acting like Republicans
In my experience, this isn’t the case unless someone (sometimes Republicans, sometimes just politicians) try to put ALL the affordable housing into specific neighborhoods for selfish reasons, or the place the affordable housing is going doesn’t have jobs because someone actively avoid putting them in the places with jobs because “them poor people are criminals and will hurt business”.
New Bedford, MA was a great example. It was an open secret that MA acted to ship a high percentage of projects and Section 8 to New Bedford. It’s also an open secret that budgeted commuter rail plans to New Bedford kept getting cut despite the rail running to the rural ass-crack of Western Mass, creating a job-starved desert of one of the otherwise most established economies in the state. Solely because somebody didn’t want people in affordable housing to have mass-transit access to most of the state.
I don’t blame “The Dems” for that. Neither should anyone. This isn’t NIMBY, this is “Let’s put them all in your back yard. Then put more in your back yard. Then keep it coming. Then burn the bridge. Aren’t I doing good?”
It really is the Dems on this one. Esp. in MA, which has a Democratic supermajority. And California, and New York, and Illinois. All of those things you are saying are problems are problems created by Democrats, in Democratic-controlled states, because wealthy Democrats don’t want to live near poor people.
I’m not saying Republicans are better; Republicans absolutely have a “fuck them poors” attitude, and the Dems are at least claiming to want to treat people decently. But Dems aren’t following through with what they say they want to do–affordable housing for all–while Republicans are definitely following through with their promise to fuck everyone that isn’t already in the top 10%.
BTW - section 8 should be great for a landlord. You are guaranteed payment on the 1st of every month, and you can still initiate eviction if the tenant is trashing your property or doing crime. But most landlords that aren’t slumlords generally hate that shit, because they don’t want poor people living there even if they’re getting their money. It’s stupid and short sighted.
I’m not sure you understand how Massachusetts politics works (or perhaps any local politics). I can’t speak for the other states with in-depth knowledge, but boy can I school you about Massachusetts.
Federally, we’re a deep-blue state, but that’s just not all of how it works at the state level. With a few exceptions we usually have a Republican governor. Yeah, the rest of the US like to call them “RINO” because the’re not on board with the craziest shit the alt-right has to offer. Most (if not all) of these changes happened under Romney and Baker, both Republican. Of note, none of these changes I’m talking about have ever shown up in a bill in legislature. They’ve all be driven by the executive action upon the mandate. That is, they fall on the governor. Who was Republican.
…and yet, I didn’t say it’s The Republicans, either. Democrats could’ve stepped in by passing laws preventing that behavior. We didn’t because our Democrats like to keep peace with our Republicans and, frankly, because the Democrats don’t care enough to involve themselves in the HOW as long as subsidies are happening.
But Dems aren’t following through with what they say they want to do–affordable housing for all
Again, I can only speak for MA. With one very recent exception (and excepting the recent excessive price spikes), MA does fairly well with providing affordable housing for all as long as it’s outside of Boston. But I think I wasn’t being entirely clear. I am mostly talking about Housing Project availability. Section 8 is, as you suggested, up to the landlord. It’s worded to allow people to live basically anywhere, even in the heart of Boston, with a limited income.
BTW - section 8 should be great for a landlord. You are guaranteed payment on the 1st of every month, and you can still initiate eviction if the tenant is trashing your property or doing crime
From family experience, the issue is that “trashing your property” can cost you years of profits or even force you to sell the building. I’ve had family deal with the notorious “cement in the toilet” meme for real. People really do it and it really costs a massive amount of money to handle. Home and landlord insurance does not cover intentional damage by tenants. We’re talking up to $15,000 damage just because they’re mad you’re evicting them.
Most landlords don’t care about “not wanting poor people” with Section 8. They care about having judgement-proof tenants who can cause damage and never be held accountable due to being poor. They also have to meet certain building code and quality standards that non-section-8 landlords don’t! There’s a LOT of non-section-8 rentals in New Bedford for this reason. No, they’re not trying to gentrify Durfee Street, I promise you that!
There’s two sides to the section 8 coin. Side 1 is that the rent is slightly above-average and some of it always shows up on time. Side 2 is that the rest of it is often late, overall risk is higher, and then you actually can’t be a slumlord. I mean, look at the list of rules. Everyone I know living in New Bedford apartments have (checks list) shitty or broken HVAC, decaying building foundation, crappy interior stairs, pest issues, flaking paint, etc. Not only can landlords get away with a lot of that (and worse) normally, but Section 8 includes annual and spot inspections for all of them.
I don’t fault the state making these demands, but it leads to a lot of people not registering their rental with Section 8, for reasons that have nothing to do with Poor tenants (and in many cases BECAUSE they’re going to have poor tenants who won’t pitch a fit about a not-to-code apartment). I’ve rented from places that would have failed Section 8. And I kept my mouth shut.
In Illinois you didn’t have to ‘register’ for section 8 (I believe it was called ‘housing choice’), but it’s been a long time ago. (I owned a house that had two apartments; I lived in one, rented the other out.) Most tenants are functionally judgement-proof, unless you only rent to upper-middle class people. Sure, you might get a judgement against them, but that doesn’t mean you’ll ever see a penny of it. As far as not being a slumlord, I have absolutely no tolerance for landlords that don’t want to keep properties in good repair, full stop. Yeah, it’s expensive to replace a roof, but fuck you, that’s why you’re taking in rent.
Most tenants are functionally judgement-proof, unless you only rent to upper-middle class people
This is fair on large damage numbers, but you can often squeeze someone making $40-50k/yr if they owe you $5-$10k in malice-caused damages… but more importantly, for that kind of damage, you’re talking about small-claims court. You don’t need a lawyer, just time, and “they poured concrete into the toilet - here’s my bill” is the kind of open-and-shut case small-claims court thrives on.
As far as not being a slumlord, I have absolutely no tolerance for landlords that don’t want to keep properties in good repair, full stop
100% agree. But even super-renter-friendly states do little to hold landlords accountable. If you want to be a slumlord, you can be a successful slumlord. Tenant holds you to task with the state? You don’t renew the lease. There’s ways they can fuck with you if they know better, but often they don’t. From someone I’m involved in a lawsuit with (can’t give details), slumlording is a no-brainer as a numbers game. 100 slum apartments, get sued once a year, huge win.
Yeah, it’s expensive to replace a roof, but fuck you, that’s why you’re taking in rent.
Fuck yes. I’m not a huge fan of the whole “all landlords are evil” tankie rhetoric, but boy do I sympathize with them on the specific topic of slumlords.
They don’t assume the risk? The moment I don’t pay by the third they are threatening to evict me. They charge rent that covers their monthly mortgage payment and then some. It’s the same shit. The place I rent now is owned by progress and it’s 50/50 it seems what they cover. On top of that I have to clean it all (professionally now , that’s new) when I move out. When I moved in the place was 1700 and now it’s 2400. There’s so much risk they’re taking in renting me a place , charging rent , but not getting anything back for it.
They’re threatening to evict you, yes. But actually evicting you, in at least some states, can be challenging. I know someone that rented out his entire home (long story), and got paid about three months of rent before they quit paying. It took him nearly two years to get them out. (Last I knew he was suing the agent that vetted them; apparently there was collusion, and the tenant has done this multiple times before.)
The flip side is that if you quit paying your mortgage, it’s also going to take months or years to get you out of the house, but then the bank has a piece of real estate. Banks don’t want to own real estate; that’s not their business. They’re not set up to buy and sell real estate. Foreclosing on a house costs a bank a lot of money.
Renting can be cheaper, too; a tenant isn’t on the hook for repairs to a unit, but when I need a new roof in my house, or the water heater goes out, I get to pay every penny of that myself. Yeah, the mortgage is cheaper, but just because you can afford the mortgage doesn’t mean that you can afford everything else that goes into owning a home.
Don’t worry about that, landlords have figured that out. There’s a new 500 unit apartment complex that is currently being built in the Philadelphia suburbs that is taking applicants for units at the affordable price of $3500 per month.
A roof that fails on a 500-unit apartment complex will be cheaper to replace per unit than the roof an a single family home. Same with a water heater that serves multiple families rather than a single family. Honestly, it’s a good argument for communes, but communes have their own set of social problems, since it can be hard to get people to take responsibility for shit unless you go into it with the same kind of contract that you’d have when renting.
Because that’s not the driving cause of minimum rent ballooning past the “30% of income” guideline for median earners in nearly every city in the US, while home prices are getting too high for someone spending more than 30% of their income on rent to save enough for the down payment necessary to be able to afford buying a home.
THIS is the housing crisis. Not a lack of residential buildings for people to live in, but rather people being priced out of home ownership at every step of the game.
The thing causing such price increases? Corporate ownership of residential buildings, because when they’ve bought out all the housing in an area they can set the price at whatever they want to make that money back. They have far more money and credit to buy up these homes than 999,999 out of a million individual owners, and they can use that to strong arm us out of the market. If you’re not already in the game, you’re barred from entering.
I think there should be some leeway for people who own one home, but want to temporarily live in another city, so they rent their home while living in another rental property at the other city.
I think that is something that could be discussed but we‘d need to make sure peeps wouldn’t just search for a way to circumvent the law (which is always a problem).
True, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be easy to do. If you own more than one home, BAM, penalty tax that is equal to 100% on the rent on that property. If your second home is empty, BAM, quadruple the property tax. You’ve just made owning a second home impossible to profit from.
Funnily enough, between the time I wrote the comment you replied to, and the time I saw your response I thought of a loophole capitalists could exploit which needs to be addressed.
If corporations aren’t allowed to own residential properties, and a person is only allowed to own a single home, a capitalist could find a person who doesn’t own a home in that territory, buy them a house with the condition that they will manage the property and get 99.9% of the profit it generates. That way, a corporation could go business as usual while technically being compliant…
The proposed law needs to include a section that addresses these sort of loopholes.
I already thought of this as a potential loophole but chose to ignore it since there will be a ton more. Imo, the law should be made as vague as possible and include something like „if a company by any means gains the ability to own or control residential buildings, they should pay twice the amount of revenue (not profit) they make of it. In repeating cases, all people involved with the transaction as well as all directors of said company face up to 10 years in prison.
I think laws should be as clear as possible, not vague. By making a law vague, you’re leaving it for the courts to interpret, and there are plenty of Florida judges who would absolutely stretch their interpretation of the law in a way that conforms to their beliefs.
But I completely agree that making it a criminal act to attempt to circumvent this law would be a key here. Maybe even forcefully dissolving the company entirely for repeating offenders.
The first part is tricky as it entirely depends on who the offender is. The fact there are sick individuals at the wheel in the US is hardly shocking to me. But in most other countries the judges are still somewhat decent people but bigotted lawyers will find ways around clear cut laws.
Through my experience with both, the legal system and being an executive, I can tell you that its mostly psychopaths - either as lawyers or clients - that will use this to their advantage.
But I guess you‘re right. If we can make it illegal to circumvent this law, it doesnt need to be as vague as possible.
Little food for thought: if the legal system is corrupted, its not a legal system but a control scheme.
Good question. I didnt think of this. Maybe one needs to make an exception for hotels or something? Obviously this would need to be restricted so residential homes dont get transformed to hotels en masse.
People can only own a few (say, 2) houses (Marriage, death, inheritance, etc. This makes things easier in the long run).
Multi tenant buildings must be majority owned by a tenant co-op, where all tenants have equal say in all building related things and share in the profits This makes sure landlords can’t raise rent without convincing the tenants that it’s worth the price, incentives the tenants to either maintain the property or hire professionals, and makes their rent an investment in their property, just like a home owner
I’m sure there’s holes all over this plan, but I (and some friends) have put thought into this one a bit.
I have extended family that fall into “lower-upper class” but also know their income has an end date (comes from a lucrative career). They saved up and every time one of their kids turned 18, they bought a house to use as a rental property with a “just in case, my child will never end up homeless” gameplan. Not a huge cash expenditure for them and not a huge profit center, it bought them peace of mind a WHOLE lot cheaper overall than adding an apartment to their house for him to move back into as an adult.
I always found that reasonable, and it did in fact keep them from ending up with a basically homeless 30-something.
I understand the idea and its great if they were able to do that but the world would look a lot different if they would actually do it differently. There would be more houses to buy and they would be cheaper, their money would need to be put in other things to collect interest. The kids would be able to buy the houses themselves at 18 and the parents would have the same outcome, just bad actors would not be able to buy up the market.
To be clear: your extended family is not the problem imo and would not suffer from a law like this.
I understand the idea and its great if they were able to do that but the world would look a lot different if they would actually do it differently
I don’t think anyone has demonstrated that’s true. If everyone but megacorporations stopped owning property other than the one they live in, I don’t thin housing prices or rent would go down. In fact, it would have unexpected side-effects like increased rental rates (since you’d have to jump through even more hoops). Imagine if you will, the pre-flip car lease market. Owning cars was the way of the poor, leasing a new car every few years was the way of the rich. If only owner-occupied could be rentals, rent would skyrocket and the MANY people who want to rent would have to fight with each other. Consortiums would find a legal way to buy luxury rental buildings and have a dedicated “owner” live in them. As you implied, supply and demand. A lot of people don’t want the liability of property ownership for reasons other than “being too poor to buy a house”.
There would be more houses to buy and they would be cheaper, their money would need to be put in other things to collect interest
Yeah, it would collect more interest. So long as nothing happened to them (which it hasn’t), they’d end up a lot richer. But it’s a lot more risk because if something did happen to them, it would be harder for that money to be earmarked into a trust in the kids’ name like the houses are. So they would have had to live with the real risk that their son would end up homeless, but yay they’d have a lot more money.
The problem with a lot of people suggesting real-estate reform is that they don’t understand why individuals (not big businesses, that’s different) buy rental houses. It’s rarely about maximizing profit, it’s about minimizing or mitigating risk.
To be clear: your extended family is not the problem imo and would not suffer from a law like this.
Except, it sounds like you just said they would not be allowed to do what they did, and would be stuck with riskier propositions. Those houses were purchased under little LLCs so that if they got sued into bankruptcy their kids would still have a home (they themselves are under Homestead protections like most homeowners in my state). Not that they expected to be sued, but it’s called “doing anything to make sure my kids don’t end up on the street”. That’s what happens when you grow up in poverty. And there really is no better, simpler, and more reasonable way to make sure your kid won’t be homeless than to buy them a house. And if you’re not filthy rich, that doesn’t mean buying it cash and handing it to them on a silver platter. (technically, I think that silver-platter method would still be allowed under the plan I’m objecting to because the kids would have an owner-occupied house in their name… yay rich people I guess. My family isn’t rich enough for that)
I think you made valid points there. I‘m not familiar with any of the anti bankruptcy measures you just named. Sounds like your family did their research.
To be honest, I still dont think your family is the problem but I dont feel like this is a fair discussion among equals.
I said my piece and you questioning my motives kind of unnerves me. Is your family privileged? Absolutely! Is it fair to the others that they are able to buy homes and even keep them if they fucked up financially while most other lose everything? Not in my opinion.
But I‘m still not after families that try to secure their childrens future. As a privileged person, you might want to add some empathy to your answers in the future.
I’m not questioning your motives directly. I’m suggesting that the changes you’re looking for are still going to cause more harm than good to most people.
Is your family privileged? Absolutely! Is it fair to the others that they are able to buy homes and even keep them if they fucked up financially while most other lose everything? Not in my opinion.
Have you ever read Harrison Bergeron by Vonnegut? I’m not a capitalist, but I still firmly believe you need to show your work when you want to take action that hurts the lower 99% to “even the playing field”.
As a privileged person, you might want to add some empathy to your answers in the future.
You just wrongly accused me of not having af air discussion among equals, and then you pull this? The only thing you know about me is that someone in my extended family has made enough money in their life to buy two rental properties. They don’t owe me anything. How does that make me privileged?
Further, you’re accusing me of lacking empathy. Why? I have the same problem with preventing them from buying a house as you would have if I said we needed to kick EVERYONE out of their homes because somebody out there is homeless. It’s the same thing to me. It’s obviously not the same thing to you. Do I get to say you lack empathy because of it? Because I don’t plan to. Instead, I like to engage as to why that’s a bad idea.
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