Landlords getting you to pay off the mortgage. Banks getting landlords to take the risk of failing mortgages to pay off low interest central bank loans. Central Banks using your economic activity to issue loans that entrench the powerful. Every step of the chain only rewarded by collateral and not value creation. What a system of extraction.
Back in the 90s I’d get rejected by landlords if my take home wasn’t 4x the rent.
Get rejected now for less than 3x. The solution is juat ‘die on the street’.
No, that’s illegal. They’re pushing through legislation to scoop up the homeless and throw them in the camps, too.
living on the street is illegal, dear. The trick is to slip in on the technicality!
Gotta make a retirement plan, yo. I’m gonna die of exposure in a hike when i’m too old to work.
…assuming there’s still “the woods” by then.
assuming there’s still “the woods” by then.
Of course there will be silly, it’ll just be wholly owned by the richest individuals and companies. You won’t be able to afford to die alone in the woods, let alone hike there.
I would recommend dying in the bleakest way you can tjink of
In the 2010’s it was down to 3x. Are the kids being asked to pay more than half their income for rent?
According to recent data from NYC (pretty expensive example but still) the rent-to-income ratio (median yearly rent / median yearly income) is ~55% citywide but up to 80% in the Bronx (which has the lowest income of the 5 boroughs)
https://www.realtor.com/research/nyc-q2-2025-rent/
Edit for clarity: the median income number is also per “household” (I’m assuming per apartment in this case), so it accounts for multiple working people living together
That 55% figure has been true of New York for decades. The ubiquity of public transit has historically offset the costs: since people aren’t making car payments, the portion of their income that would go to that gets spread across other spending.
I would be more interested to see figures in more car-oriented areas for a better apples-to-apples.
I mean I guess if it takes you most of your life saving up to buy a house to rent out, but thats not really what we have now we have all these equity firms and stuff
This is the real problem. People on Lemmy like to lump “landlords” into this one big group. If someone buys a second house as an investment property and rents it out to cover the mortgage and if fair and responsible to the tenants, I don’t see why that’s a problem. They could have put the money in a brokerage account in stocks. Then some equity firm buys the house instead. The renter rents either way. But in the first scenario the property still belongs to members of the working class. In the second scenario it belongs to the equity firm, slowly eroding middle class residential ownership, and if that continues soon all property will belong to corporations rather than individuals.
Also no one person owns a large scale apartment complex. Pretty sure those are all owned by corporations.
And that’s really why people should be upset. Not uncle Bob renting out his in-law unit so he can make a few extra bucks. (What’s he supposed to do, let it sit unoccupied when that’s housing someone could use?)
If you’re making passive income from someone else’s labor by leveraging the fact you own the basic necessities of survival, you’re not in the working class. “Lemmy” lumps landlords into one big group because there’s literally zero difference in the fundamental relationship. Mom and Pop landlords aren’t better than small business tyrants and the exact same bullshit is spread around defending them.
spoiler
Tell me you expect to inherit your parent’s house without telling me
So anyone who owns a rental property is not a member of the working class? What a fascinating world you must live in.
It’s a world you can live in too if you accept that words have definitions instead of just vibes
Justifying rent seeking just encourages buy in to the very system he’s complaining about. Confusing assets with value production. It’s like a form of corruption that seems normal because it’s how Western society operates.
What’s he supposed to do, let it sit unoccupied when that’s housing someone could use?
Letting it sit unoccupied? How about not hoarding basic necessities and at the very least sell it instead of letting it “sit unoccupied” because he can’t make a quick buck over the backs of the working class?
You don’t know what an in-law unit is.
Yet another person who wants to be a part of the conversation but doesn’t know what the words mean.
No, seriously. If you’re hinging your argument on the fact that they don’t know your latest slang for ‘renting a room’ then you’re a fucking idiot.
An “in-law suite” is different from renting a room. It generally has its own entrance, and a devoted kitchen and bathroom. It’s an entire 1-bedroom apartment built into the house or property (often above a garage, for example).
And it’s not slang, it’s a term that’s been used since the early 1900s, and as the term suggests, it has historically been used to be able to care for elderly parents (so they can maintain their independence while still living with family). It’s not like you can sell an in-law suite separately, and selling one’s house while a parent doesn’t need that and expecting to not only buy another house and having one available with an in-law suite when a parent does need it is a pretty extreme expectation. So it really does come down to rent the room or leave it empty.
And plenty of people want that kind of temporary rental, if they don’t want to be tied to a particular spot for long or don’t want the responsibility of owning.
How exhaustingly pedantic. Oh okay. So it’s renting a couple rooms. Totally worth making the distinction.
You’re still hoarding housing in excess of what you can use and using it to generate a passive income. Literally nothing about the argument has changed.
or you could be a normal person and just explain that term instead of making your whole reaction smug derision
More like you spend most of your life savings to buy a house, but you can only afford it in a rural area, and the mortgage is so high that you require to rent a room out for like $3000 to even it out, and nobody is willing to pay that much for a room.
In Madras fucking Oregon houses in town are going for $500k. What insanity is this?
Pro tip, go pirate
You wouldn’t download a house
The fucked part is to buy a house, there’s a debt income limit because nobody thinks you can afford the payments otherwise. That limit is much lower than 2/3, a bit under 1/2 when I bought (and we were forced to buy points to lower interest to get the payment there, which could have been down-payment instead).
It’s all very fucked.
I was amazed how much “financial advisers” claim I can afford to pay for things like housing. Like you are absolutely nuts that I’m going to pay 50% of my income just on a place to sleep.
We manage at 50%, but we don’t have car payments or student loans and the alternative, renting, is much higher. With a mortgage, you also get equity and pay down principle, so it’s not just a place to sleep. It’s like 25% to bank and 25% into nonliquid savings.
Renting at 50% or higher is a full loss, though. And honestly, if you have plans to travel, have kids, or just expensive hobbies, it really eats into your ability to fucking live your life.
How else those poor landlords will be able to afford a Porsche SUV? They can’t just own only a mere BMW or a Mercedes!
