...thing does not in-and-of-itself constitute a job. But there's a uniquely amoral aspect of being a landlord that's absent from any other kind of rental business. As an example, let's compare being a landlord to renting out moving vans. When I rent out a van to someone, I'm...
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...giving them temporary access to something they will only need for a short period of time. This is also true of rental cars, Blue-Ray disks, skis at a ski lodge, etc. The need is temporary, thus it is in the best interest of the consumer to rent instead of buy.
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By contrast, no human being will ever go a day in their life not needing shelter. At no point do you not need a place to live. The need for shelter in a specific area may be temporary, as in the case with hotels, but we always have to have somewhere to call home.
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Replying to @RoseOfWindsong
Yeah but most human beings don't live in the same place for long enough to justify the cost of a home - the fact that very few of us can even actually afford the price of a home is why the mortgage market exists and is so central to our society
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Replying to @arthur_affect
And the vast majority of people who do buy a home sell it before they've paid off the mortgage, and do so at a financial loss once the middlemen are paid (a loss disguised by the fact that much of the apparent appreciation of real estate is just keeping up with inflation)
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Replying to @arthur_affect
@arthur_affect what are you trying to prove by saying this? That people with investments in real estate are just as economically vulnerable as the people who they would evict? Who are you trying to protect by arguing semantics with people who believe housing is a human right?1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @AstronomyBeck
I'm not some huge fan of landlords but "Everyone should just own their own home" is an obviously unworkable idea The realistic option to replace private landlords is public housing or housing co-ops, both of which take effort to set up
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Replying to @arthur_affect @AstronomyBeck
Look at it this way, the fact that we've so stigmatized renting in our society means that whenever we get an incremental measure of housing reform it's always aimed at homeowners and at trying to relax credit so people can buy a house by going into debt
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Replying to @arthur_affect @AstronomyBeck
The 2009 housing crisis was a result of this cultural bias The alternative model of reform, public housing, nearly always gets strangled in the crib It doesn't provide the "dignity" of home ownership, being a tenant of the government is even lower than just being a tenant
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Replying to @arthur_affect @AstronomyBeck
There's a ton of reluctance to fund "the projects* - in many cases they're deliberately built to be unwelcoming and institutional - because we have a bias toward the idea that public housing should be temporary and pushing you toward "settling down" in a house with a mortgage
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And a ton of things about our society have gotten messed up by this bias, not least of which is suburban sprawl and climate change
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