[[Let’s get something out of the way. We, on the left, have this revolting tendency that I want to steer clear of entirely for this sensitive and important topic. I am genuinely appalled, and frankly I simply don’t understand why some so-called leftists feel it’s okay to make fun of landlords. It’s unacceptable. Might I remind you that landlords live paycheck to paycheck? Your paycheck, sure, but still.]] And, might I also remind you that rent in the US has gone up at a rate of 18% over the last 5 years alone, and almost 150% since 1985, completely outpacing inflation. Meaning every year that goes by is more money in landlords pockets than the year before.
[[And I’m sure you all know that more money means more problems… Tragic. Anyway, let’s talk about landlords for a minute.]]
First things first, this video isn’t about landlords as individuals. Landlords can be awful and landlords can be chill. There’s truly every flavor of landlord out there, not that I’m suggesting we should eat them, of course. No, this video is about landlords as a class and the power that that class has. It’s not a video about how individual landlords choose to use or not use this power, that’s up to them, though most landlords absolutely abuse their privileged status.
[[No, this video is a criticism of that power itself, how it underlies the landlord-tenant relationship, and the many awful consequences of landlords existing that we might want to reconsider. I’m not talking about individual people you might know that happen to be landlords, especially not any older relatives who rent out an extra property to supplement their retirement, for example. This video is about the existence of landlords in general. So, what’s the problem with landlords?]]
Generally speaking, landlording is a form of rent-seeking behavior. That’s pretty obvious from the fact that the thing we give landlords is literally called rent, but let’s actually go over what rent-seeking means for a second. Landlords, like all rent-seekers, make money not based on any work they do, or in exchange for producing anything of value, but on the simple fact that they own something necessary, in this case housing. They do not add anything to society, but they do accumulate wealth. Normally, accumulating wealth is something that’s only supposed to happen when you produce wealth, something that happens when people work. Taking thing A, and, through varying processes, turning it into thing B which is worth more, for example.
[[That’s what creates value in a society. And landlords just don’t do that. While some landlords do a minimal amount of work, the big appeal of becoming a landlord is obviously the fact that it’s quote unquote “passive income,” meaning that it doesn’t *require* any work from the landlord themself. That’s because, at the end of the day, landlords are just the people who own the deed and nothing more.]]
What the law considers “livable” requires very little effort to maintain once the developers, architects, and construction workers have already taken care of it, so either landlords will do very minimal labor or hire a property manager. In other words, a landlord doesn’t actively produce anything for society, or at least they don’t need to. You, in contrast, most likely do. In your role as a worker, you probably transform some raw material into something else, or you provide a service to someone else, or you create something for others to use or enjoy, or you’re currently pursuing some kind of education or training
and will do one of these things soon. The important thing is that without you, there would be no economy to speak of.
Natural resources would stay in the ground, food wouldn’t be food, people wouldn’t get the services they need to move through their days, and so on. [[Most likely, your boss pays you money for the work you do because it’s produced something of value for at least one person, if not society writ-large. But the same can’t be said for landlords.]]
Landlords don’t produce anything. They don’t design the buildings they own, that’s architects.
They don’t plan or even finance their construction, that’s developers and governments. They don’t actually build the houses, that’s construction workers. They don’t handle the wiring, that’s electricians. They don’t fix your sink, that’s the super or a handyworker of some sort.
[[Landlords literally just own the house. That’s it. Legally, that’s all it takes for them to collect rent. Anything else they *choose* to do is extra credit. But landlords will tell you the opposite. To try to justify themselves, and their parasitic role,]]
landlords will often say something like “well, landlords provide housing.” The idea being that this is some kind of service landlords are doing and if we didn’t have landlords, where would people get their homes? Where would they live? Where would they sleep? Where would they plug their PS5s in? Some other outlet? Don’t be ridiculous.
[[And this is an almost coherent argument assuming you flat out ignore that the housing is there already. Other people did the work. It’s done. In reality, landlords provide housing the way scalpers provide tickets. They don’t.]]
Somebody already printed out the tickets, scheduled the show, booked the artists, hired the technicians, rented out the venue, and put the tickets on sale. Landlords are nothing more than a useless middleman, controlling more of the supply than they can use themselves, exactly like a scalper, in order to resell it and skim money off the top. A lot of money.
On average, landlords in the US make $97k a year. In other words, more than double the average renter’s income. That means that if you rent, your landlord, on average, makes twice as much as you and does literally nothing. This is particularly appalling given that there is no state, metropolitan area, or county in the U.S. where a worker earning the federal or prevailing state or local minimum wage can afford a modest two-bedroom rental. And,
in only 9% of all U.S. counties can a full-time minimum-wage worker afford a one-bedroom rental.”
[[The amount landlords demand for rent, to keep for themselves as they passively earn income, is literally so high that even a person working a full time job can’t afford it.]]
At best, landlords might claim that their added value to society is that they are facilitating the transmission of housing from the person who built it to the person who will eventually live in it, but even that isn’t true. Not only is that almost labor, and that defeats the whole purpose of passive income, landlords make the process worse. If the landlord could buy the house in the first place it’s because it was already on sale somewhere, meaning
that anyone could buy it themselves. Therefore, landlords *interrupt* the process of housing going from producer to user. They take a one step process and complicate it. As part of this intrusion, they actively slow the process down and make it more expensive by out-competing legitimate consumers, all thanks to their privileged financial means.
[[Because landlords are privileged. And to see that, look no further than another thing landlords say. Oftentimes, you’ll hear landlords tell people that if they don’t like the landlord-tenant relationship they can just leave, or buy their own homes if that’s what they prefer. It’s so simple! Just buy your own home if you’re so upset. But it’s obvious that’s a bs argument, right? Buying a home is ludicrously expensive and landlords know this.]] While you can take out a mortgage to finance buying your home, you will still need to pay a downpayment if you want to own a house, and that will *need* to come from
your savings. You can’t take a loan out for a downpayment pretty much anywhere. That means only someone with enough in their savings can even consider homeownership an option, meaning we’ve already filtered out millions of people from the “just go buy your own house” argument.
[[Then there’s the fact that a mortgage isn’t even guaranteed. Banks will frequently deny people a $500/m mortgage if they think they’re too risky, blaming a low credit score, but of course see no problem letting that same person continue paying $1000 a month in rent. Most landlords know this too, and will take advantage of their good relationship with the bank thanks to their privileged financial status, to once again act as a middle man.]]
Most of the time you are renting somewhere, your landlord is simply passing the cost of a mortgage off to you, their renter. They’ll pay the downpayment because they have enough savings and you don’t, quickly make it back within a few months of renting the property out, and then cover the cost of a mortgage every month using your rent check. At the end of the day, you might have paid the full cost of the downpayment and even the entirety of the mortgage, but they will own the house. You will leave with nothing, and they will be left with an asset, effectively for free.
[[And this might make it seem like, since you’re essentially able to afford it, you could theoretically save enough for a downpayment and just own the house yourself. But of course, that’s an almost impossibly difficult thing to do when 30+ percent of your paycheck already goes towards paying for housing every month, because you’re forced to be a renter.]]
Only those born into wealth can skip the renting phase and go straight to the homeownership phase, since everyone else needs to rent while they work and save up enough for the down payment.
So really, the “go buy your own house” argument also doesn’t apply to most people under 30. Then, on top of all this, there’s the landlords who don’t use this clever“ passing the buck” trick with their mortgages, and whose rent checks are pure profit. Just as an example, 45% of landlords in the UK have no outstanding mortgages whatsoever.
Every cent you send their way goes directly in their pockets. They have the asset and, simply because of that fact and nothing more, they collect the money.
[[So if you can’t afford to buy your own home, after all millennials have 35% less wealth than previous generations at the same age, a singularly high mountain of student l oan debt, suffer from the fact that housing prices have been on an upward trajectory their entire adult lives, and around 70% say that they are waiting to buy a home because they simply can’t afford it, what are you supposed to do?]]
Well, if you don’t like renting because it’s exploitative and rent-seeking and you can’t afford to own your own place because staggeringly few people can, the only option left is homelessness. And homelessness, apart from being one of the most brutal, crushing situations a human being can experience, also happens to be pretty much illegal all over the country. Everywhere in America, cities erect anti-homeless architecture to drive the homeless out and make their mere existence miserable. It’s illegal in many public places to pitch a tent or even just sleep and cops will happily often enforce these laws, or enforce the anti-homeless law they imagine must exist even when it doesn’t.
Cops frequently destroy homeless camps, beat the homeless, or otherwise make their existences hell. And, once again, landlords know this is the alternative. And they know that if you complain they can always call the sheriff and have you evicted, violently pushing you out of your home and closer to the terrifying possibility of becoming homeless. Landlords are not shy when it comes to using this pressure.
Officially, 3.6 million eviction notices are filed each year, and that’s just the official evictions, not including all the evictions millions of people are forced into when landlords suddenly jack up rents and you’re forced to look elsewhere. The result is that, in any given year, 3.5 million people, 1.4 million of them children, experience homelessness.
[[What this all means is that every lease you’ve ever had has been signed under duress. While you technically have the freedom to choose what landlord you sign a lease with, most people do not have the freedom to not sign a lease at all. The only other reasonable option, homeownership, is unaffordable, and it’s either that, or you’re out on your own, with your most basic human need going unmet. That means renting isn’t just a normal transaction, it’s ransom.]]
