A Boring Dystopia

What do families do, that only want or need to live in a place or area for like a year or so? Buy a house, pay thousands in closing costs and inspections, lose several thousand to realtors, and then have to go through the trouble of trying to sell the place a year later?

We very much need landlords. What's screwing everything up is corpos doing it as a business or individuals with like 20 homes instead of one or two. Renting a house is a viable need for some people and it would actually suck if it was an option that didn't exist at all.

I am a landlord and also have a full time job. I also spend my time fixing my units.

With the maintenance cost and taxes, I'm actually losing money or breaking even depending on the year.

My tenants are living in a house that they wouldn't be able to afford on their own in today's market. Being able to live near their work.

So why am I the bad guy?

Mao was right about many things. But he was most right about Landlords.

I would argue that a live-in landlord that does maintenance work or acts as a building super is in fact doing a job.

Otherwise, agreed.

Rental income is considered income, and taxed assuming reasonable tax brackets much higher than investment income (That is to say, caiptal-gains. Interest/Dividends are also taxed at the higher income rate)

The cost of maintaining a livable home, property taxes, insurance, property depreciation, and renter interactions eat into the supposed windfall that landlords make.

I'm not saying it doesn't suck sometimes and that certainly these formulas are out of whack in some situations, but there are no easy answers.

Landlords existing isn't a boring dystopia. Pick a different community for the meme.

Folks, there's a difference between a slumlord and a decent landlord. I've owned a house for ten years now, and in addition to the mortgage and taxes and insurance I pay every month for the privelege, I've had to spend tens of thousands replacing the roof and doing other regular maintenance tasks. I'm actually about to dump thirty percent of the original purchase price into more deferred repairs and maintenance to get it back to a point where all the finished space is habitable again. Owning a house is expensive in ways that I did not fully understand until I bought mine, and decent property managers are taking care of all that for you, and if that's not a job I honestly don't know what is.

Slumlords and corporate landlords can fuck right the hell off, though.

How has no comment in this thread yet mentioned Georgism or Land Value Tax? That is the solution to Landlordism

Landphobia on my Lemmy? It's more likely than you think.