• Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          32·
          10 months ago

          I’m physically unable to keep up maintenance on a home and the land around it. Landlords do have a place in society, in my opinion

          You might be physically unable, but you’re not monetarily unable. Most landlords just pay someone to do it with the money you gave them.

          Whatever you are paying in rent is enough to cover the costs of that property and then pay for your landlord’s own lifestyle on top. You are being robbed.

            • fox [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
              27·
              10 months ago

              It’s pretty straightforward math. A landlord’s income is necessarily the cost of maintenance of a property plus some extra as profit. Otherwise they’re losing money and therefore wouldn’t be a landlord. But since their income is the rent you pay, you are therefore paying for everything plus their own cost of living.

              • WarmSoda@lemm.eeEnglish
                1·
                10 months ago

                Correct. I’m paying him to take care of everything so I don’t have to do it. Lawn. Plumbing. Damages. That’s all one person for me. I’m paying that one person to take care of all of those things so I don’t have to. And the price never changes.

                See what I mean?

                • booty [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
                  23·
                  10 months ago

                  Lawn. Plumbing. Damages. That’s all one person for me. I’m paying that one person to take care of all of those things so I don’t have to.

                  No, you’re paying that person to then pay other people to take care of those things. If you tell me your landlord handles the lawn, plumbing, all repairs, etc, I’ll just call you a liar.

        • Zodiark [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          32·
          10 months ago

          Housing in the ussr used to cost like 5-10% of monthly income. The state can certainly regulate housing if not outright provide it.

          • WarmSoda@lemm.eeEnglish
            4·
            10 months ago

            Oh absolutely. But Investors make money off of it, so “what can we do?” Gotta protect the people on wall street that don’t do anything.

        • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          21·
          10 months ago

          Landlords by and large also dont keep up on maintenence. If and when maintence is done, its usually by someone else who isn’t them. They don’t personally provide anything, and yet take 1/3 to half if not more of working peoples income, which is the problem we have with them.

          That’s cool if the people you’ve rented from are different. I’m not saying that in a person to person, individual basis they are all bad people or anything, but as a class it needs to end

          • WarmSoda@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            10 months ago

            I don’t want to deal with hiring anyone to do anything. I pay my landlord to do all of that. That’s worth it to me.

            For example, when I moved in the fridge died about a year in. I told my landlord and he sent me the name and number of a repair place. I told him that’s nice, but it’s not my fridge and I’m not going to call anyone for it. That’s his job. That’s why I’m paying him. That’s why I’m calling him.

            I’ve got other things to do. He owns it, he deals with it.

              • WarmSoda@lemm.eeEnglish
                1·
                10 months ago

                Sorry, unfortunately I live in the real world and don’t have an extra few hundred laying around for an unexpected new fridge. And no, owning my own home would not give me that extra money. Because, again, I live in the real world.

                • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
                  20·
                  10 months ago

                  What real world exists where paying a massive % of your income to a landlord is cheaper than doing those things yourself???

                  Getting a fridge fixed is a fraction of what rents cost basically everywhere anymore. i could get a really nice new fridge for less than my monthly rent.

                  And remember they tried to pawn it off on you in the first place. They’re parasites. They need to go. Que the quote about the Maoist uprisings against the landlords.

  • flan [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    26·
    10 months ago

    canada needs to do something about landlordism, it’s a huge problem there. They blame the unaffordable housing on ‘foreign investors’ but the ‘foreign investors’ are coming from inside the house.

    • YourFavoriteFed [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      11·
      10 months ago

      I’m not Canadian, but do you know why they seem to blame foreign investors specifically and not just investors, period? If it’s just xenophobia, then why bring up investors and risk people turning their eyes to domestic investors?

      • flan [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        15·
        10 months ago

        It’s racism / anti-China rhetoric. Usually when they talk about foreign investors they mean Chinese investors specifically. There have been a number of studies that have completely discredited the idea but it perseveres. Canada’s housing market never really went through the same contraction that the US housing market did. Prices have just continued to increase for 20+ years. I would hazard a guess that most people buying houses today are paying more than 10-20x their annual income for it.

        Because housing has reliably increased in price for a few decades now there is a relatively large number of people who own more than one house and rent them out. In fact many people will turn their basement into an apartment (which is honestly the worst fucking thing, I haven’t personally rented a basement apartment but many of my friends have and it sucks). It’s just an awful situation. Obviously the conditions that lead to Mao were much worse with landlords having extreme control over tenants lives, but it is still a tremendous burden on the Canadian populace. So we won’t get a Mao any time soon but man the situation sucks.

        I have zero empathy for even “mom and pop” landlords for this reason. There’s a lot of nonsense in the news talking about corporate landlords vs mom and pop landlords and they are both terrible. Mom and pop landlords might actually be worse because they scrutinize and dehumanize their tenants more because they don’t farm it out to property managers who are paying their staff minimum wage to barely give a shit.

      • KarlBarqs [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        13·
        10 months ago

        It’s just racism, plain and simple. The media ran breathless pearl-clutching stories about how lots of Vancouver’s real estate was owned by Chinese investors basically parking money overseas by buying properties and leaving them empty. This was then extrapolated over to Toronto.

        The reason the foreign aspect is underlined is because of how dominant the idea of white replacement is in the housing discourse here. If you ask anyone who isn’t Marxist about the housing crisis, you’ll get two responses: it’s either foreign investors buying all the properties and hoarding it so Canadians can’t access it, or the Liberals/Trudeau “bringing in” a tens or hundreds of thousands of immigrants to Canada when we have “no room” (ignoring that half the country is literally empty). People here don’t believe investors are the problem - just that the wrong investors are trying to ruin things.