Memes

By being landlords or personally knowing landlords.

My parents own multiple rental properties and completely straight face told me it's a charity cause they rent to people who can't afford homes.

Meanwhile I'm engaging with my mutual aid group every week handing out about 400 meals, and survival gear for people who can't afford anything.

Glad their fucking charity has turned enough profit to pay off the rentals, their main home, and their vacation spot though. /s

The people saying that are usually hoping to become landlords themselves.

I just found an article (from 1955) by my grandma where she argued that she prefers renting over building a house because she has more freedom that way. She can move more easily because she doesn't have to find a buyer for her house, she doesn't have to worry about something breaking because that's on the landlord to fix and she doesn't have to go into debt to live somewhere.

As far as I know she never owned a home, always rented. But all her kids bought houses.

They kinda are necessary, given how they're the byproduct of capitalism's private property model and its commodification.

You could technically remove them by having the state manage all the housing, but that's overly idealistic given how that'd go against the ruling class interests which would cause heavy lobbying by big landowners. It would also make the state a monopoly landowner which would have its own implications.

In other words, they're necessary not because they're useful, but because of how dogshit the system is.

I was ready to hate on this post... but you right.

And then they try to fuck you over when you leave the place by pinning all the costs of normal dilapidation on you. Fortunately where I live the law forbids it but it doesn't stop them from trying every time.

The land is what’s gaining value, not the structure on it

Good tenants make the neighborhood more desirable. So the rent being raised is a way to punish good Tennant, and steal their hard earn benefit from their existential labour.

If there were only a set number of cars available and creating more was prohibitively expensive, cars would appreciate in value as well.

And to be clear, I'm not talking about the house; building more of those is expensive, but doable. It's building more land that's the tricky part

For a lot of them, they don't even care if there's tenant turnover, especially if its a high-demand area. There's no incentive to fix a broken AC; the tenants already signed the year lease. They can get to it next year when its time to clean up the place for the re-listing.

i hope you do; seeing it is a depressing reminder of how much americans think that exploitation like this is okay and even more depressing to see people exploited like this want to perpetuate it.

"understood, create a factory town and offer housing in exchange for employment." ~ Bezos

The reason Georgism fell out of favor on the left is because Marxism already develops beyond where Georgism falls flat. It's certainly broadly appealing, in that liberals can get behind it rather quickly, but it falls short of Marxist economics in completeness, to the point that it doesn't really bother resolving the fundamental problems with capitalist exploitation, centralization, crisis, or production and overproduction, it just focuses on rent.

It's also very difficult to get through, it's a reformist approach that depends on asking those that have full control of the economy to make it less exploitative. That doesn't happen without revolution, at which point you can go far beyond and address core, systemic issues.

Leftists are aware of Goergism. They don't generally take it seriously because it's just 'one weird trick' reformism that's trying to save capitalism from itself. It doesn't change what capitalism is or the historical process it drives, it'll get clawed back immediately just like every other social democratic reform, and it would cause a full on capital revolt if you somehow magic lamp'ed it into practice such that you might as well just do the real revolution and actually overthrow capitalism for the same amount of effort.

but the ideology is so centrist and common sense

I really just commented as an excuse to lol at this line.