Lotta people chiming in on the profit rates for landlords – and while I admit that there are shitty landlords out there, I think it’s worth considering the ‘standard’ individual-owner landlord situation (which is historically the ‘norm’ for landlord situations). Ie. Someone who’s a bit older, has an ok amount of savings from working, and wants a second income stream from ‘somewhere’ to hedge against layoffs.
What they typically do, is take out an interest only mortgage with a 30-35 or higher year term. They add in the cost of tax on the property, and any maintenance/condo fees involved, to the cost of paying that interest only mortgage - and that generally sets the rent amount. They use that income to pay off the carrying costs of the property, and hold on to it for a few years assuming that housing prices will always go up – and after 5-10-15 or however many years, they can sell the property for its higher valuation. These deals are often done as Variable mortgages, as they offer lower interest rates, but also expose the landlord to greater risk with interest rate changes (which they pass on to renters).
And as properties in the area increase in cost, the cost of the above formula also increases, prompting the landlord to increase their profit from ‘carrying’ slightly over the years, assuming it can offset the increasing maintenance costs of the unit.
I’ve periodically looked at rent prices in my area, and done the above, and they seem pretty much in alignment. It’s one of the likely reasons you’ll often hear jokes/stories about landlords freaking out at tennants because a bank’ll yell at them if they’re late on payments – because yes, the rent is basically paying off the interest part of the mortgage on the unit. It’s also one of the reasons ‘new’ home owners (who are actually living in their homes) will typically initially pay ‘more’ than renters, but over time they pay less in terms of monthly carrying costs (not even looking at the principal pay down - just the fact that they get a rate that doesn’t get ‘readjusted up’ every year to align with increasing house prices).
Y’all are missing something imo. Landlords are artificial demand - they drive up the housing prices for everyone, including home owners.
The argument that it costs to maintain a home blah blah is BS - if it wasn’t profitable then the landlords sell it. They’re not being charitable. They make a profit and it comes out of poor people’s wages.
Why do you think it’s been made so difficult to own a home? Long as you’re paying rent, you’re a cash cow. Also less likely to leave a crappy job.
If you all think landlords make that much money, why don’t you guys all get together and form a housing association? In fact there are plenty of housing associations that sell shares.
With building and repair costs at an all time high, being a landlord isn’t as profitable as it used to be.
And the high interest rates make it even less profitable. It’s more attractive to invest elsewhere. And impossible to pay off a mortgage with rent.
If more people were able to build apartments, we would be able to reduce the housing shortage and rent would go down.
The one thing landlords do that I would consider theft is lobbying (bribing) for NIMBY policies. Especially zoning laws.
Is it better to pay mortgage interest to a bank?
I pretty much agree with this. The economy has grown up to be for parasites made by parasites. The value of work should be way higher that it currently is. The economy should work on people actually doing things rather needing to own to become prosperous.
Wait till you hear about loan interests and collateral. Maybe even covenants down the road.
It wouldn’t be an issue at all we were paying to a normal person who’s got ex. To pay for their mortgage, for college debt etc. The issue is that we are paying evil corporations and not normal people. We are fueling gentrification and we can’t even boycott them
Why wouldn’t it be a problem paying rent to a normal person? Being a slave in Rome 2000 years ago, you were a slave regardless of whether you were owned by a small owner with just a few slaves, than one with 200.
No, the issue is rent seeking parasites in general. If anything the ‘mom and pop’ landlords are even fucking scummier because YOU HAVE TO LIVE WITH THEM KEEPING YOUR FUCKING HEAD DOWN AND DOING CUSTOMER SERVICE IN YOUR OWN FUCKING HOME YOU’RE FUCKING PAYING FOR
The level of fucking entitlement these people have to treat you literally however the fuck they want is unmatched.
Painting the hallway? Why bother saying anything? It’s my house. Oh, you got paint all over your brand new sweater? Lol. It hasn’t been 3 months yet so ‘if it doesn’t work out’ you’re out on the street same day! Haha!
What? You’re upset at the pile of cat shit that’s been in your bathroom for a whole day because I don’t give my FIVE cats litter boxes? You’re going to talk to me like that?? Pack your bags, loser! My parents were rich!
Speak, cowards. I see your sullen angry downvotes. Do you have anything to fucking say for yourselves or not?
the majority of landlords aren’t corporations. 8.9 perecent of all resdential housing stock is own by corporate entities.
91.1 percent is owned by individual landlords.
the people i’ve known who rent corporately owned properties are typically well-off. all the corporate owning-housing in my area is largely over market rate and mostly rented out by rich people who can easily afford it.
That’s such a irrelevant/misleading statistic. People aren’t griping the incorporation vs soul proprietorship of landlords. More than half of those individual landlords own multiple rental properties. Thousands of them own enough rental properties (4+ in Canada) to require a property management license, that many do not possess.
Individual landlords are the ones buying up detached homes, hoarding them as extortionate rentals until selling them as land assemblies so that corporations can build overpriced breadboxes.
If you live somewhere without strong tenancy laws than corporations basically get a free pass on colluding to drive up local rental pricing. End of the day they own the apartments around universities and hospitals where demand will meet any price.
@zedgeist How about rent of things, as opposed to rent of living space? I’m specifically thinking of the hardware I’m renting for this Fediverse server. A network connection, power, and cooling come with it. In my view this is more acceptable than having to rent a house or car. (Related topic: is having a car moral? Related to that: Is there a moral argument to be made for our against living away from a population center? And related to that: why the Hell do people refuse to wear masks during a pandemic?)
Is my renting that hardware more paying for a service than straight rent? There’s certainly the aspect of my not being able to afford the hardware cost up-front and just renting space, network, and power.
Ideally I’d just run the server in my cellar, but I live in the woods and trees fall on the power lines all too often. (Loop to the question of the morality of living away from population centers.)
Rental of land is unique because land ownership is made by drwing line on a map and drawing up a contract with the state. Equipment rental is the product of labor that has transformed natural resources into something people can use.
Land ownership is fundamentally a violent act in that paper agreements are a surrogate for establishing territorial dominance. End of the day land ownership is enforced though force.
Renting objects on the other hand is rooted in mutual benefit. Tool creation and use being separate skills creates a natural opportunity for cooperation.
it’s about your usage needs.
renting and owning have different costs, more than purely economic. if you own your own hardware… you have to maintain it. if you rent it, you don’t.
if an AWS server blade on which I’m hosting blows up, I don’t have to go spend $5000 to replace it. if I am running off that server blade from my home… it can blow up with the bonus risk of possibly burn my house down. also if someone hacks my serve in my basement and stuff CP on it… well that’s another big risk that I wouldn’t have if I was renting, because if someone hacks my amazon AWS rental space, the cops aren’t going to come raid my home. they subpoena amazon.
home owning is no different. it involves much more risk than renting. and being a landlord assumes yet more risk as you take on the risk of your tenants.
but most people dont’ understand any of this. they don’t even have a basic economics 101 understanding. there is also this thing called insurance, usage agreements, etc, that all have pricing affects and can be used to mitigate risks at increased costs.
I run IT for my company in a hybrid structure. Certain legal requirements and risk factors require us to keep certain services/data on premises, and other services we have moved to the cloud (rental) because it’s cheaper and takes less man-hours of maintenance and assumes less risk. 10 years ago were entirely on premises and used zero cloud services, but we also had more downtime and had to shut down operations if we had a power loss or connectivity. Now power loss has a minimal impact and connectivity losses are mere annoyances.
Basically whomever runs for president needs to announce building out - nationwide concrete apartment complexes construction program on a massive scale.
Offload at least 30-40 mln people demand. Housing costs gonna drop insanelyUnfortunately as that would gain votes. It would also prevent votes as it would be basically announcing to anyone that owns a house that their retirement nest egg is going to shrink drastically. One of the perks of owning a house right now is it’s worth a lot of money and is going to be worth more in the future. So I don’t see anyone who currently owns a house voting for this . It’s a shitty situation but i don’t know the solution. Well government housing is the solution but they’re going to have to sneak it in somehow and it’s going to piss off a whole lot of people. I think 99% of millionaires are millionaires by real estate or some crazy number like that.
Rising home prices have driven retirement nest eggs for generations. People would own a house for a few decades, and it would steadily rise in value.
Today, people expect to speculate with their houses. They expect the value to double every decade. That’s not good for anyone. If you own a house whose value has risen dramatically, who is going to buy it? And if they do buy your house, where are you going to live, when presumably all the other houses have also risen?
All this speculation has done is drive the price of housing up so only the wealthy and investment groups can afford houses. That means that all those Middle Class people who used to grow their net worth by buying a house when they were young, and holding it for life, are now priced out of participating, leaving a few lucky people with expensive houses that nobody can afford to buy or rent.
You buy another house that’s cheaper and you pocket the difference in value.
That may not be in the town you want, or the size you want, or etc. but that’s life. Where I live people make 500K a year whine there are no houses, but that’s because they want to live in mansions in the most expensive towns and won’t settle for the 1.5million dollar ‘dump’ they can afford.
Investment groups don’t own anything. Most properties are owned by people who use them and they want the values to go up as much as they can, while their property taxes go as low as they can. normal people are insanely greedy, and everyone who becomes a homeowner becomes this way because it’s it’s in their self-interest. very few people are going to want to buy a house if it goes down in value.
if you were a landlord you would not think rent is theft. you’d start realizing how much it costs to own property and you’d keep having to raise you rent as those costs went up. If I went and bought a 3 unit building in my city it would be 2-3 million dollars. The mortgage would be about 15K alone, which means before all other costs, reach rental unit would have to be 5K. Even if I bought it outright, the taxes, fees and other costs would be 2K per unit. The market rate in my city for such a unit is about 3K. Is that ‘greedy and evil’ or is it just basic economics?
Investment groups don’t own anything
Simply WRONG. Companies like Blackstone (and many others) are buying up single family homes as fast as they can, with an eye on controlling the rental and purchasing market, and they are already having an effect on prices. Even MAGA is considering regulating it.
And of course you can sell your home in a HCOL area, and buy a new one in a LCOL area, but what if you don’t want to leave the area where you grew up, raised a family, made friends, where you family still lives etc.?In order to access your retirement fund, you have to leave your home and go somewhere far away, to place that isn’t nearly as good, away from everything you built in your life.
And where are those LCOL places anyway? Florida used to be the big one. Sell your expensive house in the Northeast, and buy a nice house in the Florida sun for a quarter of the price, and all your relatives and friends will come and visit often.
Except Florida housing is as expensive as NY now, so that doesn’t work. Perhaps you can find a reasonably priced house in a small town in Alabama, or Mississippi, where the nearest movie theater is an hour away. That should be fun. I’ll bet your relatives can’t wait to visit you in Buttfuck Holler, Kentucky.
And yeah, it’s simple economics, except you forgot the part of the equation where housing prices have skyrocketed, while decades of harshly suppressed wages, and crippling student loan debt, have made it increasingly impossible for people to afford housing. We have now entered an era where your “simple economics” have led to living in your vehicle being considered a viable housing option.
Employ some Critical Thinking Skills, and don’t just parrot empty Conservative talking points.
only 9% of residential housing is owned by corporate entities. corporations are no sizable impact on housing prices in the market at large. 91% of homes are owned by individuals.
housing prices have skyrocketed because residential homeowners and renters, oppose new housing. the USA has systematically build less housing than it needs since the 1990s, meanwhile the population is has grown by about 100 million, while only building new homes for about 1/3 of those people. in 2024 the USA build 1.35 million new homes, willing adding 3.2 million new residents. we are building about 1/3 of the housing we need just to stabilize prices. if you want to lower them, than you’d need to build more houses than there are incoming people.
in my own city, which has highest housing costs in the country, renters groups systematically oppose new housing, and wonder why their rents go up 5-10% a year. we build about 3000 new units of housing a year, meanwhile we have 30K incoming residents a year. if you have about 10x the population coming in every year as you have new housing, rents are going to skyrocket until you build enough housing to meet demand, and rents won’t go down until you build enough housing to exceed demand. if rental groups stopped opposing new housing, we’d have more than double the amount of new housing, and rental prices would be less than they are.
people liek you are the problem. because you blame CORPORATIONS MAN. when it’s people like you that go to your town/city meetings and demand all new housing projects be stopped or downscaled because you don’t ‘want anymore people moving here since i already live here’. but when it comes to say, adding jobs to the local economy you are all for it.
my city recent approved a massive development that will bring 20,000 new jobs. this new development is also building 200 new units of housing. it was proposed with 20K jobs, and 2000 new units of housing. but the people who live this city thought that was ‘too much’ and wanted the 20K jobs but 1/10th of the proposed housing.
the issue is everyday average people including renters. they don’t want new homes to be built. so the prices keep going up.
if you want prices to drop or stabilize in your city, then go to city meetings and demand that every any any housing project be built ASAP and as largely as possible.
First of all, 9% is a HUGE number, far large enough to start influencing prices, and it is growing quickly. That 9% will be more like 20% within the next few years. We can see the trend clearly, do we really have to wait until it is an irreversible problem before we even acknowledge it, and then abandon hope for a solution because it’s too late? Or maybe we say, “Hmm, 9% and growing? That’s going to become a problem, maybe we should do something about it NOW.”
Secondly, good for your state or whatever who is putting controls on building. My state, and my area, is not. I travel the entire east coast for work, and traffic in Central Florida, where I live, is easily the worst on the East Coast (the only competition is the DC-Baltimore stretch at rush hour, I avoid it at all costs), and they can’t build huge housing developments and apartment complexes fast enough, and dump more cars on the streets. And just this week, they just announced that the Mormons, who own a giant tract of land east of Orlando, are going to build an entire new CITY, with a population that will rival Orlando. The state has already approved a new TOLL highway that will connect the area, and that new Toll road will run through two protected conservation areas, which the county is not happy about. In Florida, conservation land is really important…until you have to build on it.
Of course the state is happy to cooperate with attracting a few hundred thousand Mormons to Central Florida, diluting the Democratic voting strength in the last Democratic stronghold in Florida.
So nice try, but your experience is not what’s happening in MAGA regions of the country. They are using housing to service the only MAGA constituency - the wealthy.
you’re wrong. objectively. you are delusional and making ridiculous statements that are objectively false, both about housing and about MAGA, neither of which have anything to do with each other.
democratic voters have higher incomes than republican voters. most high income people (100K+) vote democratic in the last election the groups that voted republican were working-class incomes between 30-100K.
Why concrete?
It’s energy intensive (~& polluting), unhealthy, and does not last.
Various other options are available now. Lime hempcrete, and various myco-based solutions, for a couple examples.
With various suppressed technologies, if de-secreted and availed, we could even be building giant forest arcologies, and even linking them up to create vast forest arcologyscapes, increasing the carrying capacity of earth into the hundreds of trillions. Not saying we should, just saying we could, and that we have so much headroom without these crooks, these rentiers, seeking to keep others down just to maintain their power over others, even if it means making themselves worse off than what they could be in real terms, in egalitarian freedom and abundance.
Also, I hear there are already sufficient number of empty housing to house all the homeless… but the hoarders do not want to avail that for good use. They want to remain complicit in the manufactured scarcity to increase their return on investment, keeping the bubble growing.
Lime hempcrete, and various myco-based solutions
AFAIK, those are replacements for insulation. They have like <1/10th the compressive strength of concrete
A more immediate solution than building khrUShchevkas would just be to announce broad rent caps and implement rent assistance programs. Perfect no, but the logistics of building that much housing would be… insurmountable in any reasonable timeframe.
Both can be done, though. There’s more demand for dense housing in cities than there is availability. Simultaneously build millions of housing units for social rent and cap existing prices or directly expropriate rented housing.
I think at a certain point this line of reasoning devolves into “the US should become communist” and while yes that would be a solution it’s not exactly a practically achievable one in the short term.
However, the US already already sort does this - there were ~6 million total subsidized housing units in the US as of last year, and roughly 7 million total Khrushchevka apartments built across the USSR. The US is behind the soviet statistics here, having a higher population and lower subsidized housing count than the USSR at it’s peak (and should absolutely be doing better to be clear), but it’s not like this is a completely neglected concept - and there are real, practical barriers to implementing a similar policy of mass construction: the US largely already being urbanized and building modern codes being the two biggest (look into the state of the foundations for a Khrushchevka if you ever want to see why extremely time consuming site prep steps like soil surcharging and foundation curing are critical (soil hydrodynamics is a shockingly modern discipline in structural engineering)).
Things like an unoccupied home tax (as someone else mentioned) are an immediately workable solution, and have had excellent results thus far. Hopefully they can continue to be adopted, though I fear there may be a brief pause on any kind of beneficial social progress while we have a small civil war in the US.
edit: clarity
Source for the 7mn Khrushchevki? That number seems entirely too low. Maybe you’re not counting Brezhnevki? Because I remember figures of more than a million housing units being built yearly.
While “US becoming communist” is not achievable on the short term, “regulatory policy to improve rent under capitalism through reform” has even less of a background if you ask me. Like, housing is getting worse everywhere under capitalism, and better nowhere. What makes you think reformism is a more likely scenario?
What makes you think reformism is a more likely scenario?
The many recent examples of mucipalities and states passing regulatory policies to improve rent under capitalism are the primary one I’m using here. People are doing things to address housing,
Maybe you’re not counting Brezhnevki
I’m not, no - nor stalinkas (not that those were all that prolific comparably though). It’s a limited measurement, obviously USSR social housing policies do not compare to the US, but the initial suggestion was specifically about rapidly-constructed slab concrete buildings and nothing typifies that better than a Khrushchevka. If you have a better source I’d love to see it, I approximated that off the average apartment size of 46m and the total constructed of 2,900,000,000 sq m, which is the best approximation I could get from the wikipedia sources and I may well be missing some reports.
The many recent examples of mucipalities and states passing regulatory policies to improve rent under capitalism
Can you tell me generally big examples of places where this has happened and things have gotten better? As a European, the only cases I know of are the Berlin referenda for rent caps and expropriation, and both have had no lasting effect because higher courts have sabotaged them and declared them illegal (I don’t understand how a referendum can be illegal).
the total constructed of 2,900,000,000 sq m
Are you sure this is flat-area and doesn’t need to get multiplied by number of flats per building?
Tax on second (or more) homes, tax on unoccupied by owner homes, should both be astronomical.
Oh god yes, my municipality just implemented an unoccupied home tax and the change has been night/day - the tears of AirBNB owners watching their property values plummet have been absolutely wonderful to watch, too.
As Churchill put it…
Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains — all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is affected by the labor and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of these improvements does the land monopolist contribute, and yet, by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived…The unearned increment on the land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice done.
Lets translate that
“If you can not buy a house in cash, you should live with your parents or be unhoused.”
Think there’s also difference between someone renting their mass bought properties vs someone renting their extra flat for a fair price. Corporations renting properties they mass bought should be illegal.
What’s “a fair price”? 1% over production + maintenance costs is already exploitative, in the sense that rich people who can afford to buy the flats will do so because they will get passive income from it, and poor people who can’t afford housing will be forced to rent at prices higher than otherwise.
If the housing market gets so unprofitable that people aren’t building enough apartments, even though enough land is zoned for building, prices are too low.
That just leads to homelessness.Imo students and just people who don’t want to buy. One small flat I saw is like 6k czk a month. But ideally there should be free such flats that are just room and bathroom with showers free to anyone.
The USSR had such dorms for students and people in waiting lists for housing, idk if they were technically free but the fee was ridiculous if it existed. Rent, for example, was 3% of the monthly incomes. I do think we should have such social housing, both in flat-form and in dorm-form, for whoever wants to rent a very cheap housing unit.
Guys, y’all should read up on Henry George. It’s so logical that it is accepted by both sides in politics.
Meh. I’m a commie, and it’s just a half measure. It attacks the problem of landlordism, sure, but it doesn’t fight concentration of wealth in other forms, such as financial capital, capitalist ownership of media and means of production, or even climate change.
Moreover, it doesn’t provide any means for organizing and actually carrying out the policy, which is why it never happens. Ideology and politics aren’t exclusively a theoretical field in which we can democratically test every policy without disturbance, and Georgism doesn’t answer the simple question: why would the landlords in power allow the workers to tax them our of power?
See there’s an issue you want a one size fits all that’s never going to happen. Focus on fixing one thing that will help the population astronomically.
why would the landlords in power allow the workers to tax them our of power
Well through public ridicule or at gunpoint I’d imagine
See there’s an issue you want a one size fits all that’s never going to happen
It’s happened historically in several countries, whereas georgism has happened in a total of 0.
Well through public ridicule or at gunpoint I’d imagine
Great. Now, who are the people organizing and agitating the workers to gather the numbers and strength to do this at gunpoint? Hint: again, not the Georgists
… “both sides”…?
Laughs in 8 different political parties deciding the direction of my country.
It’s so logical that nobody can understand it or support it…
Georgism has never ever been politically viable.
I worked in land theory, in a Georgist think-tank for 5 years.
What did I learn? That the citizens, the administrators, and the politicans, all hate Georgism because it is too fair and too progressive. Most lemmy users would hate it too, because it isn’t about ‘punishing’ someone or ‘rewarding’ someone. It’s good and neutral policy.
Logical and fair politics and policy is something everyone says ‘is good’ but they never want to actually do it because politics is about ‘my side beating your side and hurting them’. Lemmy here is full of lefties who fantasize about beating up right wingers, and then claim they wish no harm on anyone except anyone who wishes harm on them.
Georgism: “let’s introduce immense taxes to landlords”
You: “this is neutral and apolitical! I hate the left!”
I hate this type of posts. There’s nothing wrong with renting or paying rent. Most of American rent problem is because of high rent, not rent itself.
I hate these kinds of comments. No shit we’d be okay with cheaper rent but they’re not going to make it cheaper out of the goodness of their heart. We have people’s who’s whole job is to “sELL hOuSES” and profit from it
Nah it’s more like the reality outside america where people outside of affluent class own multiple properties too, and corporate isn’t involved in property renting scene. So our rents are lower per square feet for same property, than in the west.
How’s there nothing wrong with paying rent? Why is someone else appropriating the fruits of MY labor just because they happen to be lucky enough to inherit a house?
sorry, what about your labor makes it more valuable than anyone else who also rents?
Nothing. Abolish all private rent and socialize it
Then the government will need to purchase the houses / apartments from the current owners so they still get a giant payday.
Then you’d still be paying rent, just to the government instead which will mostly go towards paying administrators that don’t care or do anything just like current landlords.
Unless you mean all social government owned housing should be free, and most private property should be government owned.
Then the government will need to purchase the houses / apartments from the current owners
Expropriation can be carried out without purchase, and it has been done in several countries to the great benefit of the workers. No need to pay for the housing of the landlords, we can just take it at gunpoint.
Then you’d still be paying rent, just to the government instead which will mostly go towards paying administrators that don’t care or do anything just like current landlords
Who says the housing has to be centrally administered? Housing could absolutely be organized by local collectives in charge of the maintenance of the buildings after its construction, likely in the form of democratically elected councils. As an example, most access to housing in the USSR was through the work’s union, not through the central government.
Unless you mean all social government owned housing should be free
No, people should pay costs to maintain it. For example, rent in the USSR was about 3% of the monthly income. Seems much better than what I pay now!
The important part in this equation is that you can choose not to rent from them.
Yes, you can choose to die on the streets instead. What’s your point?
At the same time, if you choose to live in an economy where you don’t pay rent, you will barely find anyone outside your family willing to lend you a home.
And replying to your previous comment, idk about America, but in other parts of the world, people outside of affluent class have homes, and rent is close to or less than 4% of property value annually, not 6-8% Americans are used to. That’s likely because corporates don’t buy property here at scale they do in America.
you will barely find anyone outside your family willing to lend you a home
Yes, that’s why housing ownership should primarily be socialized, and access to affordable rent should be a right guaranteed by the public administration as much as healthcare and education.
rent is close to or less than 4% of property value annually
That’s still a worthless metric, though, rent should be proportional to construction costs + maintenance, not subjected to markets.
You’re fundamentally asking for a different society. To be very honest, the Idea is great, I just don’t see how it’s gonna be implemented. Also you gotta be happy with pretty minimal houses, but I guess people in twenties who are just starting with life, this could be all they need.
Yeah Ik this is core communist ideology, I don’t have anything against communism. I just am saying what you are asking is very different from what society is today.
Well, yes, I’m a communist, but seeing the housing in literally every western capitalist country suffering from the same issues, I have 0% of hope that the issue of housing will be solved within capitalism. Capitalists are in power and they’re the ones owning the housing, so they simply will prevent legislation from passing unless forced by worker organizing.
I don’t see why communism is equated with minimal houses though, housing size is more or less proportional to the wealth of the country and less so to ideological stuff. The USSR is famous for small socialist flats because most were built during industrialization in a post-war condition. East-Germany flats from the 1980s, for example, are much larger.
most americans want to be rich and are jealous as hell they aren’t the rich, and if they got rich, they would be just as greedy and self-interested as they rich they claim to hate so much are.
I’ve seen pretty much all my 20s anarchist/communist friends become landlords who now argue that taxes and tenants are evil. they felt exploited and now they feel free to exploit… it’s almost as if it isn’t about fairness and more about bitterness and power.
people tend to become the things they hate.
