It's a pretty sad situation that people can't afford 'rent'.
But in fact 'rent' means to tear, split, rip, etc, and that's exactly what it is. People who 'own' land, ripping money from people who don't.
But, land is common heritage like air and water, it belongs to us all, and individuals should not be able to own it, or at least not to own and 'rent' it.
Rent is a ripoff, by nature, and in it's very name.
Not that I disagree, but that's an etymological coincidence. Very often when two quite different concepts have a similar word it's a matter of Latin or Greek vs Old English roots and this is an example. Monetary rent comes eventually from Latin reddere meaning "to give back". Back from there it's Proto-Indo-European.
Rent as in a tear comes via Middle and Old renten/renden and back to Proto-West Germanic and then it goes cold.
Renting provides mobility and freedom from the burden of property "ownership" (which is really renting from the bank and state). You shouldn't be so quick to let your gleaming idealism sully judgement of otherwise reasonable and prudent financial decisions.
That's an obvious false dichotomy. If everyone who wanted had the choice between renting and owning, and the average landlord made a decent living off of providing maintenance and "deed-holding" services, you might have a point. As things actually stand, most people are squeezed into the rental market and the average landlord makes much more than a decent living through an exploitative process of raising rents on tenants who do not have choices.
It is a false dichotomy but it's instead this: people want housing to be both affordable and an investment, whereas those two goals are mutually exclusive.
I agree there are benefits to renting, but to really benefit much the landlord can’t be making incredible profits (e.g. it’s not worthwhile to rent long-term if your landlord charges you a 50-100% premium on the landlord’s cost of ownership.)
Before buying my first house in 2021, I was paying $2k / month in rent in a 2 family house my landlord bought 2 years prior for $350k. There was another person paying an additional $1k/month in the same house for a total of $3k/mo of total rent for a $350k house the landlord purchased through a LLC the year prior.
When I ended up buying a house, the monthly mortgage payments were about the same as rent except the house is 2x larger with 5x more property (on the same street as the apartment I was renting).
In other words, for mobility to really be worth the cost of renting, you really gotta be taking advantage of that benefit and moving around a lot. If you’re renting a house like I was for a long period of time, it makes absolutely no sense.
Unfortunately, I think most renters do so out of necessity (not able to afford a $75k down payment, for example).
I am getting close to affording that kind of downpayment (though my realtor tells me we can get in the market on a much lower percent down), and I'm still hesitating on buying. I dislike the inability to customize the place we live in but also dislike the theoretical lack of mobility and the actual necessity of having to do housework.
I'm not supporting the parasitic nature of landlords.
But the right to own land is an essential part of a functioning society. The idea that no one should be able to own land is ridiculous and does not work. There are plenty of examples of this all across the globe.
What’s that statement based on? Ownership doesn’t exist in nature, it’s a concept humans have invented and enforce through cultural and legal means. Ownership is just one method of providing occupation, but occupation can be achieved through other means: for example, guaranteed leases for a fixed period. There’s various countries that have models beyond just simple private ownership. Even in countries like the US where land ownership is considered sacrosanct, the government will still take it away if you don’t pay taxes — it’s not ownership in the truest sense.
What do you call the territorial animals then? A tiger will chase other tigers from the area it considers its own. Same as wolves and many other species. It's not exactly property in the sense that it cannot be traded but it is indeed the ownership. Without property rights humans would have had the same: the strong chase the weak off their land or force them to pay for being on the land.
> Without property rights humans would have had the same: the strong chase the weak off their land or force them to pay for being on the land.
That's precisely what property rights are: "the strong [...] forc[ing the weak ...] to pay for being on the land". That's what property taxes are. To "have rights" is to be paid up with a protection racket. Yet as depressing as that is, it beats the alternative! In many places it's not a bad deal!
This works, ultimately, because the frail old lady can call the police, who outnumber and outgun the strong young men.
There is admittedly also an element of magic here: People generally view property rights as legitimate, and the police who enforce them as legitimate, and so on. But when that belief system fails, it's ultimately the State's ability to deploy force that reestablishes the faith.
Even other animals have the concept of land ownership. They might not use our words, but see what happen when you take resources from the territory of a bear or other territorial animal.
Even trees do that. Eucalyptus literally poisons land near it to kill competition.
That’s occupation, not ownership. Ownership can’t exist without a legal or cultural structure to enforce it. A human can occupy land and defend that occupation with violence but that does not mean they own the land. A society can exist without ownership.
> Ownership is just one method of providing occupation, but occupation can be achieved through other means: for example, guaranteed leases for a fixed period
In practice, with housing, such leases are effectively ownership. The terms on these are often 100 years or more, and when they come to term, since there are often significant improvements built in the land, the terms can't be renegotiated since the lessor can't force the sale or relocation of the improvements.
If no one individual or company can own land, then, by definition, the governing body that created the rule owns the land.
Since governments are in the business of governing, not real estate, they'll almost definitely outsource that work (or big parts of it) to private contractors like they do for defense.
The end result is that your landlord is now an even bigger private entity (that might be a conglomerate of smaller entities, which might or might not look like the institutional landlords that exist today) with the near-infinite financial backing of the government and the insanely slow processes that come with that (such as having to go through an intermediate to get that Tesla Powerwall you want to install approved, only to be told that Tesla isn't an approved supplier and that you should use this battery from $VENDOR_THAT_WE_DONT_HAVE_RELATIONSHIPS_WITH_WE_PROMISE).
so for most of recorded human history society did not function?
the only reason we're allowed to buy land is because it was commodified during the industrial revolution as the process of capital extraction from labor had moved from the land to the factories.
Land ownership is an important element of long term sustainability, as in farmers carrying for their soil in order to keep it viable for their descendants.
But land ownership as in subletting and sub-subletting and sub-sub who knows how many levels up, that is not a necessary consequence of the concept of land ownership. What if only personal use was allowed? Sure, you would definitely see hoarding and countermeasures would not be without their own problems, but there is definitely room between unbounded capitalism and "property does not exist" level socialism.
Housing build, say, in 1920 is now illegal to build but is perfectly legal to live in. Building codes and restrictions are policy failure (in Canada definitely so).
Nobody ever blames the building codes until the either educate themselves or try to build a house.
Then you realize just how difficult it is to build. It takes just as long as the build sometimes and costs thousands and thousands upfront just to get to the point where you can start.
We need a streamlined process that allows standardized housing to be built with minimal upfront costs and on small affordable lots.
ADUs are up to 1200sq feet — for most people this is a whole dang house not an accessory dwelling unit.
Want to see how easy improvement could be made? Imagine if you could write off 50-70 percent of the total cost of an ADU over 15 years as long as it’s rented out to no more than 3 tenants during each year — and eliminated the ability of cities and counties to block their development as long as they fit on the lot. You’d have a massive increase in affordability in just a few short years.
It’s the laws and the zoning that are the problem. You’re spot on.
Background: I have built several houses, both for family and professionally. Technically, I was a licensed electrical contractor. I just recently moved from a now-condemned 1920's structure to a "modern" 1970's.
The problem with modern US building codes is that there is still too much over-regulation (e.g. AFCI's required in essentially all residential splits), combined with the dangerous interconflict of builder's EGO -vs- inspector's EGO — particularly egregious when the inspector feels a one-off homebuilder "deserves" differential treatment.
I think the dumbest jurisdictions (AHJ's) are the ones which prevent homeowners from (e.g.) installing their own electrical outlets, not even in owner-occupied structures. Homeowner maintenance becomes illegal, in certain stupid AHJ's (e.g. Chattanooga); and is thus done unpermitted by a helpless-to-stupid-regulations policy.
I have been on both sides of "inspections" and know that my own personality has often been my own greatest challenge. I am oil-and-water to/with the emissionless dieselbruh contractors.
Thanks for allowing my vent, and re-enforcing some of its basis.
> But in fact 'rent' means to tear, split, rip, etc, and that's exactly what it is.
No it doesn't. 'Rent' in this context derives through french from a latin verb that means "to give back".
Your confusion comes from the fact that 'rent' can also be the past tense of 'rend' which has a different origin and comes from old english and germanic roots rather than French and latin.
Are you advocating for the abolition of apartment buildings and hotels? What would that look like? Super low density sprawl because nobody will spend the money to create a multi-unit building they’re not allowed to rent?
One option is the apartment building and land are owned by a company, and the company is 100% owned by the owners of the apartments.
But yes, it's true that many people who dislike rent may be happier owning a single family home.
After all, the apartment building will inevitably come with some sort of political process to decide things like how much this year's residents ought to put aside ready to replace the roof in a decade's time. And while such payments may not technically be rent, they'll smell very similar.
The units in a multi-unit building can also be sold; they're called condos. But of course selling a condo wouldn't allow a landlord to rent seek in perpetuity.
Tbf I don’t mind renting as a concept. The problem I had was ever increasing rents and walls so thin you can hear your neighbor snoring. If we didn’t build buildings with such terrible noise insulation and had better rent control, it wouldn’t be so bad.
But those are separate issues. Buying will protect you from rising rents, but you'll still be stuck with walls so thin you can hear your neighbor snoring.
At least when you rent, you can easily move elsewhere and hope for thicker walls. I don't know how it is elsewhere, but in France, selling and buying a new house is a very expensive ordeal. The state gets to tax you 7% of the price of the new home. And with housing prices being absurdly high, 7% is quite a sum.
I considered this, but it’s from a guy named “jack” and in the US we say “you don’t know jack” or “you don’t know jack shit” so that means this guy doesn’t know anything because his username is jack.
But in fact 'rent' means to tear, split, rip, etc, and that's exactly what it is. People who 'own' land, ripping money from people who don't. But, land is common heritage like air and water, it belongs to us all, and individuals should not be able to own it, or at least not to own and 'rent' it.
Rent is a ripoff, by nature, and in it's very name.