If we weren’t de facto forced into owning and using a car due to our car centric city planning, maybe you’d have a point.
But as it stands bike infrastructure is non existent in most cities, public transportation is a joke, there is no mixed use zoning, etc.
They’re capitalists. It’s what they do.
if they don’t put in some work to eat and get shelter, then they won’t survive either
That’s not a good world. We shouldn’t seek to emulate it. We are higher beings than other animals, and we should act as such. We have more than enough for everybody to have shelter and safety, yet we instead choose a system that prevents all from having it.
Nothing is achieved without work and input.
I never said otherwise.
So who deserves to rent?
I’m not sure I understand your question.
why do you think neighborhoods are being gentrified?
Neighborhoods become too expensive to live in, and so minorities get forced out.
Real Estate Investment Companies and banks are buying all of the properties and land
Amd that shouldn’t be legal.
I answered this a little lower down:
Where does the boogeyman capitalism figure into upholding your end of the bargain?
The part where the threat of homelessness is coercive.
If you’re unable to work, there’s an (admittedly minimal for a Western nation) safety net in place and countless charities willing to assist.
For food there is a shitty safety net here. For rent, it is abysmal. It’s incredibly difficult to get help with rent, so saying there is countless charities willing to assist is grossly misleading. Social workers always recommend paying rent instead of food for this very reason.
You still have to contribute to society. Working isn’t the only way.
Being unable to work isn’t the only problem. There are next to no places in the U.S. where the minimum wage will cover the rent of a 1bd apartment. Landlords shouldn’t exist in the first place, they are just leeches.
Is there an alternative process you are referring to? If so, what is it?
Private industries that regularly fail ought to instead be nationalized, especially ones that deal with basic necessities. The government should be building housing on a massive scale, and selling it at low cost to families, individuals for personal use only, non profit co-ops, etc. Hundreds of thousands of new apartment units ought to be built by the government as prefab units that are manufactured in pieces in factories and then shipped off for assembly at location. Basically, lego-ify housing. Such a solution would benefit greatly from economies of scale, and would go such a long way towards fixing the problem. This would take quite a lot of rezoning, but nothing impossible.
Capitalism works on the assumption that there is competition, but that’s not really possible with housing. You can’t realistically just move to a different place overnight every day to get the best deal, there are limits for how many residences exist in an area, etc. Housing is physically tied to land use, which means there essentially is no competition. As a result landlords price gouge, price fix, and charge thousands of dollars for single bedroom units that are run down and in need of repair. Government doesn’t work on the notion of competition. If the law says that X housing units are to be built in city Y, then it’s going to happen, all without a profit motive.
what incentive someone would have to develop property (finance and pay for the actual physical process of constructing a physical place for people to live
The government exists to maintain the stability and well-being of our country, so it has a responsibility to develop property to fix the housing crisis, and to replace the utter failure that is landlords. The people who actually build housing, the construction laborers, city planners, etc, they all are doing actual work and deserve compensation. Landlords don’t do that, owning is not a job and should not have a wage.
A society with landlords has failed at one of the most basic tasks. Housing is a human right, it should be easily accessible to everyone.
Great argument. You really have me convinced.
Reality is not your strong suit.
Jumping to insults when criticized shows how weak your position is.
there are certainly people who defraud them by not paying rent despite agreeing to it.
Landlords are scalpers. I have no empathy for them, nor should anybody else.
Maybe people could actually pay rent if they were charging reasonable rates and didn’t intentionally keep housing scarce. Maybe we could instead stop letting NIMBYs get away with their bullshit.
Landlords do not deserve rent, they shouldn’t exist in the first place.
Eventually they’ll just shut down the APIs that allow that to happen just like reddit did. There will still be workarounds to that, but it will make things harder.
The thing I worry about is if they go so far as to ban people’s google accounts for violating the TOS like this. I’m sure they can find out exactly who is doing it through an IP lookup even if you are using a front-end client.
It’s best to migrate everything off google accounts now before that happens. Google has too much power.