this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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Why would you prefer a landlord to just you save that money yourself? Like at best its probably a third of your income if youre working class? At worst its probably 60% or more. If you're on any kind of social assistance rent is probably almost all of your income. Hurray! No food for you mister, the poor landlord needs that pittance you receive.
You would have effectively 133%-180% of the income you do now. For me that's an increase of over a thousand dollars a month. I could afford all the appliances and roof repairs in the world with that kind of money. I would still walk away with so much extra money its a joke. You have been entirely misled about how much rent takes out of your income. They will steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from you over your life time, maybe even more depending on what you pay.
Renting exists because renters cannot advocate for themselves. It exists because people who become land owners escape the renting class and pretty much immediately turn their backs on it. No longer their problem. Because propaganda has taught them to not have solidarity with their fellow workers. Homelessness is an entirely preventable issue and is inseparable from the problem of landlords.
This comment illustrates very clearly that you are not a renter ๐ we do not have a choice! I cant just decide whether or not to own my own shelter. I am literally not given the choice. That is not how the system is designed. If youre disabled, youre screwed. If you cant afford a higher education, youre screwed. If you have debts, mental health issues, if youre a minority, youre absolutely screwed. You will rent for the rest of your life and it will almost entirely be spent paycheck to paycheck, certainly nowhere even close to daydreaming about owning any kind of home.
All the benefits youre ascribing to renting count for just owning the apartment or condo you live in. Bam. Done. Couldn't give less of a fuck about grass. I can barely afford food! Think about how insane it is for you to complain about having to cut the grass when renters have to pick between fucking eating and having a place to sleep. Youre not a leftist, youre a bog standard liberal.
I do not live in the USA. Housing is a human right and should be free everywhere. It should not be a market. No one should have to pay anything for housing. You have been fed a lifetime of propaganda to make you believe this is fair. It is not. It is one of the major things that contributes to lifelong stress and shortens lifespans. It is one of the major things that keeps people in poverty, having to pay half their income in rent that they never get back.
life isn't fair.
some people have to rent forever, yes. some people are ok with renting forever. If you want to not rent forever you need to make lifestyle or career changes such that you are on an economic path to doing so. That might involve some short term difficulty.
You had choices. You made them. I grew up in a poor town, with working class parents. I choose to go to college, by studying my ass off and getting scholarships and loans. Then I chose to pay back those loans as fast as I could once I got a job after graduating. By 30 I was debt-free. by 35 I was able to buy a modest place. I did not choose high-paying job either, I work in non-profit research where my salary is about half what it might be if i worked for a corporation.
Not everyone chose that. I have had many friends who choose otherwise, and are now 40+ with mountains of debt and will rent forever and are bitter about it. But they also used to tell me what a loser i was for not traveling partying and 'living it up'. And they are still doing that. One person I know makes 40K a year working in a bicycle shop, and yet they spend 5-8K traveling each yeah, and they feel like someone should just give them an house and are super angry at the world. if you dare suggest maybe they stop working in a bike shop and get a better career, they tell you you are a hateful fascist.
and on the flip side I know people making 500K+ a year who also say they can't afford to buy a house, because they have delusional expectations. and refuse to 'lower' themselves by buying something in their price range.
Man FUCK YOU as someone who does alright now but struggled you really just love the smell of your own shit and pulling up the ladder behind you. Fuck you how about you just shut the fuck up instead of posting this absolute drivel
You know what's worse than "becoming a slave to [your] house"? Having to work as to not become homeless.
First things first: there are already a bunch of people who don't have to work for their housing. A big part of those may have to work for an income so that they can pay for upkeep. But get rich enough and that can get payed by dividends. Or they're landlords who get enough income from rent. Those rich people don't have to work at all for their housing.
That's cool for the people who get it. But I'd be surprised if your home country has no homeless people and vacant housing at the same time.
Do those people on social programs actually have a comfortable life, though? Or is it rather "too little to live, too much to die"? I'm quite sure that landlords still make a lot of profit from rent in that country.
Introduce a usufruct model of owning, where the people who live in a home actually own it (either as a family home, or multiple homes owned by a coop). The important bit is that rent-seeking is abolished in housing. Then you might still need to work for upkeep, but that's a diminishino part of what people need to pay for rent, nowadays.
If your country is capitalist, I highly doubt that they will implement this. Profits are still required by capitalist states.
I said "work as to not go homeless". You're bringing "paying" into it. There's already a lot of place to live. Ideally, I'd see a communist society where this kind of stuff is planned on the basis of needs, rather than being speculated on in markets for profit
I'd be happy to hear which country isn't currently capitalist. And the other thing is less of an assumption and more of a rule.
... the people who live there own it. Capitalism would require the ability to keep others from using the house while you don't use it. You wouldn't be able to sell the house/appartment.
Your family requires a place to live, doesn't it? You're describing capitalism, btw. Why should your family be thrown out if they still need the house?
The community built it. Or it was already there (houses already exist, you know). I should have specified that I have a problem with wage slavery in order to pay some landlord in order to live somewhere. That's completely different than investing resources and labour to build a house.
Give people places to live and let the community build housing based on need, rather than profit. Nothing magical about that. I'll specify again: I don't want to abolish doing mental/manual labour, but working for a boss so that they pay you a wage based on the profit they made on your labour: Wage slavery. And the answer isn't simple. Otherwise, we'd be living in this world already.
The people do. I think doing so in consumer councils would be a good idea, but I'm not the arbiter of how to achieve this. Do you think that human needs are unknowable?
Who saidanything about central planning?
Well, who says that I'd want to live in that place that's way too big for me now where everything reminds me of my dead spouse? Maybe I'd like to live with my kids, or they move in and I get a place in an outhouse. I'm sure the community and I'll reach a mutual understanding where they'll understand my needs/wishes and we'll reach some form of solution, beneficial to everybody. Is that so much of a stretch, given that I'm part of a community?
Housing is a human right. We already have gigantic amounts of housing that sits empty, new building projects are not the priority.
The government should be in charge of constructing new housing developments to meet the needs of the community. People can also pool resources together to build those things, in the absence of rent and mortgages people would have substantially higher incomes. Over time this would balance out, but would still be doable in the long term.
No one should be homeless. Even if you are able bodied and refuse to work. The amount of people who are able bodied and refuse to work is microscopic. You have been misled by conservative propaganda to believe that welfare recipients are lazy. Welfare recipients are people who for one reason or another are unable to work. This is almost exclusively people with disabilities.
But yes, I think even if you decide to do literally nothing just cause you dont want to, you should still have shelter. Shelter is a human right; housing is a human right. It is a crime against humanity to deny people housing. And if youre that contrarian, to literally be like har har I wanna make a point about how dumb free housing is so ill do literally nothing, you probably have some problems you should sort through in therapy.
I had a nice long response typed up, but I genuinely do not have the energy to pick through what a thoroughly ridiculous comment this is. You're not actually here to have a meaningful conversation on this subject either, you are only here to propagandize for capitalists. So I'll save myself the time and energy.
That's true. Let's fix that.
And still: Do you pay 30 to 50% of your income in your own home for that?
How to 'fix' that? Someone has to do the work to build and maintain housing? Should they do it for free?
You could get rid of housing being a means for landlords to profit from and hold housing in a usufruct property relation, and/or in common. Building and maintaining housing can be managed by the community (or be payed for by the community).
Who pays the upfront costs? Big taxes?
In a capitalist system, the government could print the money to give out a loan and destroy that money once the loan gets payed back to soften inflation.
But ideally, building housing shouldn't be done for profit, either. But I guess that would require capitalism to be abolished. Which would be - again - ideal.
Who takes out this loan? The person who wants to live in the home? What if they can't afford to pay it back? Isn't paying interest on the loan the same as paying rent, except now you're stuck without being able to move, and no one else is there to fix your roof when it needs it?
Yup. Or coops.
What if someone can't afford rent? I'd rather see the government eat the risk than see people go homeless.
No, because if you pay rent, your rent becomes someone else's capital. If you pay off the debt, you invest in your own property.
Who says you can't transfer the home to someone who buys in? That's an advantage of coops.
Landlords usually don't do that. They hire handymen to do this, so why can't that be done by the person who lives there?
If a co-op takes the loan, aren't they just becoming a landlord? And who does the work to organize it - are they paid? Isn't that just like a landlord taking profit?
If you look at the government as just a collective of the people, then there's no magical entity 'eating the risk' - it just means the people get screwed over and/or someone doesn't get paid for their work.
Yes, you can use a handyman to fix your roof, but you have to pay them. And if you can't afford to, you what - take more loan from the government which endlessly prints money?
No, because the people living in these places own a share in the coop. It's distributing the load of repaying the loan on several shoulders and once it's payed off, the rent becomes basically only the upkeep (rather than a source of income for the owners... because the owners are the ones who pay the "rent").
Depends on how the coop manages it. But they could theoretically use part of the rent as payment for someone who manages the co-op.
No, cause that's not profit. That's part of upkeep. Do you know what "profit" is (i.e the difference between profit and income)?
I don't agree with that abstraction, but ok.
What are you talking about? Institutions aren't "magic". Risk of loss gets easier to manage if more people chip in. That's the whole reason why insurances exist. And why diversifying a financial portfolio is the best strategy for banks. Yes, some will not be able to pay back their loans. But you can buffer that with interest by the ones that do pay them back.
And your alternative is that these people who can't afford a handyman (or fix the roof themselves) can afford rent? Do you think paying rent every month is cheaper than hiring handymen? And evensif it were like that: how would the landlord afford the handyman? Why would they rent out their property, if rent was lower than the cost of upkeep? Your scenario doesn't add up.
dude, people like this don't think those things exist, because they have never had to pay for them.
they also don't understand what a payroll tax is. because if they don't pay it, it must not exist and is just some made up thing!
You can pay people for maintenance and upkeep. Like everything what you have to be careful of scammy companies, but you also have to be wary of scammy landlords.
I think if you are staying for a long time in one residence, you really are better off owning it, and buying services for it. Hell you can hire the exact same maintenance service that a landlord uses, that they pay for out of your rent.
If you have temporary need though, renting is certainly the best option.