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[[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 b
e 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
loan 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.]]
Everyone knows that housing is a good investment. It’s the number one piece of financial advice
that’s consistent from year to year and housing is probably the best thing you can
put your money in if you have it. The reason that’s true is that the demand for housing
is inelastic at the individual level. We all need to be housed, it is a non-negotiable
condition of living. That means that those who control the supply, landlords, can create
artificial scarcity to jack up the prices, since when push comes to shove, you will pay
however much you can afford on meeting your most fundamental needs. Same with food, same
with healthcare, with the added fact that the price has no relationship whatsoever to
the value added to society.
[[So far, these have all been generic problems with landlords. But then there’s all the
specific consequences of this system. For starters, in the US, a lot of the housing
supply is not held by individuals but by investment firms, further proof that it’s not work
that makes landlords money, by the way, it’s literally just the ownership of assets. Hundreds
of thousands of Americans, whether they know it or not, are renting from Wall Street.]]
For-profit firms, as opposed to individual investors, control around 45% of the housing
supply, or 21.7 million individual units according to Pew. As a for-profit venture, housing owned
in this arrangement usually comes with even worse conditions than a more quote unquote
“normal” landlord-tenant relationship. Renting from Wall Street comes with aggressive
rent hikes, fee gouging, and high rates of eviction. This is because investors have found
that, “Although tenant turnover costs companies an average of $1,500 [...] they can easily
recover that cost through late fees, court fines, or retaining tenants’ security deposits.”
[[And since shareholders demand that profits consistently outpace inflation, that cost
gets passed on to renters, in other words, you. This means for-profit firms will make
sure to make a profit by any means necessary, regardless of how many evictions it takes.
These companies will use every violent tool of the state available to make a profit, and
we have no choice but to agree to these awful terms because we can’t not have housing.]]
The perpetrators of these acts are companies like Blackstone, the world’s largest real
estate management firm, which should obviously not to be confused with Blackrock, the megafirm
that… also invests a ton into housing, $120 billion dollars by their own admission, and
which has multiple former high-level employees in the Biden admin, nor should it be confused
with Blackwater, the private security company hired by the US government that guarded the
homes of the wealthy during hurricane Katrina and was given the license to shoot at people
simply trying to flee one of the greatest disasters in American history.
[[Three very different, totally normal companies that should absolutely not be mixed up. But
back to landlording. Large for-profit housing firms use their powerful financial position
to do all sorts of cruel things, like what we’ve already covered but also like stopping
rent control laws that would prevent them from hiking rents up willy-nilly.]]
In practical terms, that means using the profits made from tenants to screw tenants over even
more in the future. Then there’s the fact that the two sides of Wall Street are mutually
beneficial. While one side exploits the nature of the market to make profits, eventually
crashing the economy like what’s happened every 5 or 10 years for the last half century,
the other side buys up the houses that get foreclosed on. We saw this in 2008. The economy
crashed due to Wall Street chasing big bucks, millions of people were foreclosed on, and
Wall Street firms, still flush with cash, bought up all that housing. According to The
Intercept, quoting Julia Gordon of the NCST, “the addition of 7 million single-family
rental homes since 2005 has “almost a one-to-one relationship with the number of families who
lost their homes to foreclosure.”
I mean, for god’s sake, even the guy who thought the invisible hand of the market could
fix everything hated landlords.
[[Here in the US, landlords make up a measly 6.7% of the total population, but a whopping
238 federal lawmakers are landlords. Our political system is built in such a way that landlording,
for all its exploitation and worthlessness to the poor, will endure because it moves
money up towards the wealthy. That is the sad reality we live in today. But it doesn’t
have to be.]]
Affordable, or even free housing, is not only feasible, it's the norm in plenty of places
around the world. When you take profiteering out of the equation, you free up funds that
can go into making public housing amazing and available to all, the way socialists in
Vienna, for example, have created public housing that not only looks great but fully houses
62% of the city.
If all landlords do is orchestrate the process of a home going to someone who needs it, but
do so while skimming huge profits at the top, never re-investing that money back into making
the property better, and keeping out millions of people who desperately need it, it’s
not hard to imagine a city or a national government being able to do the same thing better, without
all the awful rent-seeking. Millions of homes are vacant. Free or at least affordable housing,
provided with the goal of safely housing the population, not for the passive profits of
those who hold housing for ransom, can be our reality. It doesn’t have to be just
a dream. All we have to do is cut out the middleman.
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