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You'd really be running into some serious ethical problems if you made a law saying that each individual person can only own 1 residence. Not to mention the economic disaster such a law would create.

Obviously businesses need to make money - housing should not be a business. It is an essential commodity.

Why not?

Food is an essential commodity, so is clothing. You have to pay for the water and electricity that gets serviced to your home, and those are also essential commodities. And they're all businesses. Growing food, building and maintaining houses, making clothes, its not free.

The only way to not have this be the case would be if you simply killed off most people and we all went back to living in caves scrabbling for berries and fighting off wolves. And that would definitely not be a good thing for humanity.

I would not go so far as to say no landlords, sometimes people end up with an extra property for various reasons, maybe even two. If they rent those out to people in temporary situations, that is fine. I would not really consider such a person a landlord.

People (and corps) who are professional landlords, as in, all they do is own property and drain money out of actually productive people for their own profit, they are the problem.

Grey Templar: We subsidise food pretty heavily, you know, to keep it cheap. If you want to subsidise housing to the same extent that would be pretty cool. But the way it works now, most of that subsidy goes into the pockets of lazy landlords who don't do anything for their money.

Most individual landlords were born rich, inherited their money. I've met plenty of those kind of people in my life, and they are useless and lazy, the real parasites on society. Wouldn't know a day of hard work if it hit them in the face.

 Grey Templar wrote:
You'd really be running into some serious ethical problems if you made a law saying that each individual person can only own 1 residence. Not to mention the economic disaster such a law would create.

I own two. I don't want to stop people owning more than one residence. I just don't think they should be letting them at profit. I'd simply outlaw that, charge high council tax for unoccupied properties, and allow councils to spend more on property for social housing again.

Obviously businesses need to make money - housing should not be a business. It is an essential commodity.

Why not?

Food is an essential commodity, so is clothing. You have to pay for the water and electricity that gets serviced to your home, and those are also essential commodities. And they're all businesses. Growing food, building and maintaining houses, making clothes, its not free.

For what it's worth we don't pay directly for water, only via council tax, we subsidise food production and we exempt much of it and some clothing from taxes. I want more of the same support for housing. Social housing already exists, just in horrifically low numbers. That aside, there is a distinction in that access to housing is in most cases a prerequisite to acquire any other essential commodity. Try getting a job or signing up for benefits without a permanent address.

nfe wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
You'd really be running into some serious ethical problems if you made a law saying that each individual person can only own 1 residence. Not to mention the economic disaster such a law would create.

I own two. I don't want to stop people owning more than one residence. I just don't think they should be letting them at profit. I'd simply outlaw that, charge high council tax for unoccupied properties, and allow councils to spend more on property for social housing again.

If you banned leasing for profit, literally nobody would ever be a landlord. So yes, you would effectively be banning being a landlord as it would have the same effect. Who would voluntarily go through the hassle of upkeeping multiple homes and managing them if they could only charge cost? Nobody, unless you were some masochist who for some reason enjoyed that stuff far more than could be considered sane.

My parents have 2 rentals and thats almost a full time job in and of itself. If my parents couldn't make any profit out of it I guarantee they'd never do it.

Fining people for unoccupied residences is another sticky situation too. What if there is simply nobody who wants to rent the place? You'd be penalizing a landlord who is already probably having financial strain because they can't find any tenants.

The only places that should be fined and penalized IMO is things like AirBnBs. Those things are cancer for rent prices.


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 Da Boss wrote:

Grey Templar: We subsidise food pretty heavily, you know, to keep it cheap. If you want to subsidise housing to the same extent that would be pretty cool. But the way it works now, most of that subsidy goes into the pockets of lazy landlords who don't do anything for their money.

Food subsidies are a little different in the US. It gets subsidized, but for the opposite reason. The US has so much food production capability, that we actually pay farmers to leave their fields empty because if they all grew food it would flood the global market, causing prices to collapse and farmers to go out of business because their crops would be worthless.

Basically, the US subsidizes food to keep the prices above a certain level. Not to keep food cheap for the consumer, but so that we don't lose all of our farms. And food is still very cheap here anyway, so there really isn't a concern with that.

Fining for unoccupied places is supposed to incentivise people to sell up and drive the property prices down so people can afford to own their own homes rather than donating a big chunk of their income to parasites every month.

Ideally you want to encourage lots of landlords who are renting for profit that they should sell their properties and get more people into housing while also building more houses for poor people.

Anything else is economically inefficient.

 Da Boss wrote:
Fining for unoccupied places is supposed to incentivise people to sell up and drive the property prices down so people can afford to own their own homes rather than donating a big chunk of their income to parasites every month.

Ideally you want to encourage lots of landlords who are renting for profit that they should sell their properties and get more people into housing while also building more houses for poor people.

Anything else is economically inefficient.

Which is fine, till you add real world situations. Like say, an economically depressed area that has lost a lot of jobs. meaning people have moved elsewhere and the landlords are sitting around with properties that they can't rent out and nobody wants to buy. Hence the value of their property falls like a stone and, if they're like most landlords who just own maybe 1-2 properties, they probably also lose their home as well because they default on the mortgages of all their properties.

Fining people for having empty spaces is misguided and doesn't solve anything. It just trades one problem for another.

 Grey Templar wrote:

nfe wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
You'd really be running into some serious ethical problems if you made a law saying that each individual person can only own 1 residence. Not to mention the economic disaster such a law would create.

I own two. I don't want to stop people owning more than one residence. I just don't think they should be letting them at profit. I'd simply outlaw that, charge high council tax for unoccupied properties, and allow councils to spend more on property for social housing again.

If you banned leasing for profit, literally nobody would ever be a landlord. So yes, you would effectively be banning being a landlord as it would have the same effect. Who would voluntarily go through the hassle of upkeeping multiple homes and managing them if they could only charge cost? Nobody, unless you were some masochist who for some reason enjoyed that stuff far more than could be considered sane.

Almost no one other than the state being a landlord is the whole point, so that's not a negative. The point of not specifically prohibiting people renting a property is that you don't outlaw people who own a second home that a family member or friend lives in for only the cost of bills though, which is what I'd want to protect (and what can be quite common in certain occupations).

Fining people for unoccupied residences is another sticky situation too. What if there is simply nobody who wants to rent the place? You'd be penalizing a landlord who is already probably having financial strain because they can't find any tenants.

Not a fine, just differential council tax. That's already a thing. If it's too much they can sell it. Which is, again, the point.

Worth it in my view to get rid of the scourge of buy to let landlordism. Some people would suffer but they made their choice to make an investment decision profiting off of other people in this way, so I have limited sympathy.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
Fining for unoccupied places is supposed to incentivise people to sell up and drive the property prices down so people can afford to own their own homes rather than donating a big chunk of their income to parasites every month.

Ideally you want to encourage lots of landlords who are renting for profit that they should sell their properties and get more people into housing while also building more houses for poor people.

Anything else is economically inefficient.

Which is fine, till you add real world situations. Like say, an economically depressed area that has lost a lot of jobs. meaning people have moved elsewhere and the landlords are sitting around with properties that they can't rent out and nobody wants to buy. Hence the value of their property falls like a stone and, if they're like most landlords who just own maybe 1-2 properties, they probably also lose their home as well because they default on the mortgages of all their properties.

And then the state can buy them all on the cheap and the landlords can get themselves productive jobs. Success all round!

Well, since you guys all seem hellbent on state ownership of everything, you should probably all move to Venezuela. You can find your communist utopia there waiting for you.

HOUSE!

nfe wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
Fining for unoccupied places is supposed to incentivise people to sell up and drive the property prices down so people can afford to own their own homes rather than donating a big chunk of their income to parasites every month.

Ideally you want to encourage lots of landlords who are renting for profit that they should sell their properties and get more people into housing while also building more houses for poor people.

Anything else is economically inefficient.

Which is fine, till you add real world situations. Like say, an economically depressed area that has lost a lot of jobs. meaning people have moved elsewhere and the landlords are sitting around with properties that they can't rent out and nobody wants to buy. Hence the value of their property falls like a stone and, if they're like most landlords who just own maybe 1-2 properties, they probably also lose their home as well because they default on the mortgages of all their properties.

And then the state can buy them all on the cheap and the landlords can get themselves productive jobs. Success all round!

You do realize that most landlords do have other jobs too. Being a landlord is a sidegig. Most landlords own 1, maybe 2, additional rentals that make them a small amount of money after the mortage and bills are taken care of. If they're lucky, maybe its enough to cover the mortgage on their own home, and maybe justify the extra hours that they put into it. They do not in any way deserve the vitriol that you are flinging their direction. And heck, anybody who makes being a landlord a full time job is going to be working their butt off. Its not a lazy mans job.

Its only a tiny minority of landlords who are fat cats sitting in a mansion somewhere with buckets of cash they make from 'abusing their poor tenants'. We're not living in a Charles Dicken's novel.

 Grey Templar wrote:

nfe wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
Fining for unoccupied places is supposed to incentivise people to sell up and drive the property prices down so people can afford to own their own homes rather than donating a big chunk of their income to parasites every month.

Ideally you want to encourage lots of landlords who are renting for profit that they should sell their properties and get more people into housing while also building more houses for poor people.

Anything else is economically inefficient.

Which is fine, till you add real world situations. Like say, an economically depressed area that has lost a lot of jobs. meaning people have moved elsewhere and the landlords are sitting around with properties that they can't rent out and nobody wants to buy. Hence the value of their property falls like a stone and, if they're like most landlords who just own maybe 1-2 properties, they probably also lose their home as well because they default on the mortgages of all their properties.

And then the state can buy them all on the cheap and the landlords can get themselves productive jobs. Success all round!

You do realize that most landlords do have other jobs too. Being a landlord is a sidegig. Most landlords own 1, maybe 2, additional rentals that make them a small amount of money after the mortage and bills are taken care of. If they're lucky, maybe its enough to cover the mortgage on their own home. They do not in any way deserve the vitriol that you are flinging their direction.

Its only a tiny minority of landlords who are fat cats sitting in a mansion somewhere with buckets of cash they make from 'abusing their poor tenants'. We're not living in a Charles Dicken's novel.

I really couldn't care less. All renting at profit is harmful. If it's your main job, tough. If it's a side-gig for holiday money, tough.

I would likely exempt people with 1 or 2 extra homes. I think that is fair enough.

So when arguing with me you can not use that example.

You've yet to say why it's harmful...

 Da Boss wrote:
I would likely exempt people with 1 or 2 extra homes. I think that is fair enough.

So when arguing with me you can not use that example.

Well, if we're going to move the goalpost to that, that still doesn't solve the problem you allege is happening(mass ownership of rentals = bad) since it exempts most of the so called offenders.


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nfe wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

nfe wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
Fining for unoccupied places is supposed to incentivise people to sell up and drive the property prices down so people can afford to own their own homes rather than donating a big chunk of their income to parasites every month.

Ideally you want to encourage lots of landlords who are renting for profit that they should sell their properties and get more people into housing while also building more houses for poor people.

Anything else is economically inefficient.

Which is fine, till you add real world situations. Like say, an economically depressed area that has lost a lot of jobs. meaning people have moved elsewhere and the landlords are sitting around with properties that they can't rent out and nobody wants to buy. Hence the value of their property falls like a stone and, if they're like most landlords who just own maybe 1-2 properties, they probably also lose their home as well because they default on the mortgages of all their properties.

And then the state can buy them all on the cheap and the landlords can get themselves productive jobs. Success all round!

You do realize that most landlords do have other jobs too. Being a landlord is a sidegig. Most landlords own 1, maybe 2, additional rentals that make them a small amount of money after the mortage and bills are taken care of. If they're lucky, maybe its enough to cover the mortgage on their own home. They do not in any way deserve the vitriol that you are flinging their direction.

Its only a tiny minority of landlords who are fat cats sitting in a mansion somewhere with buckets of cash they make from 'abusing their poor tenants'. We're not living in a Charles Dicken's novel.

I really couldn't care less. All renting at profit is harmful. If it's your main job, tough. If it's a side-gig for holiday money, tough.

Too bad the world doesn't, and will never, work like that. Tough to be you I guess.

Again, I suggest moving to Venezuela. It sounds right up your alley.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:


Yes it is. This is fun, your turn.

I bear absolutely no burden. Your claim, your burden. I have refuted it on exactly the same ground it was advanced; naked assertion.

Nobody thinks you got your rental property handed to you. We think you got it by exploiting the labour of others.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
You've yet to say why it's harmful...

No, I haven't. Again, however: it increases the cost of housing and simultaneously makes it significantly more difficult to save in order to get on the ladder yourself. It serves to keep poorer people out of the housing market twice over.


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 Grey Templar wrote:

Automatically Appended Next Post:

nfe wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

nfe wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
Fining for unoccupied places is supposed to incentivise people to sell up and drive the property prices down so people can afford to own their own homes rather than donating a big chunk of their income to parasites every month.

Ideally you want to encourage lots of landlords who are renting for profit that they should sell their properties and get more people into housing while also building more houses for poor people.

Anything else is economically inefficient.

Which is fine, till you add real world situations. Like say, an economically depressed area that has lost a lot of jobs. meaning people have moved elsewhere and the landlords are sitting around with properties that they can't rent out and nobody wants to buy. Hence the value of their property falls like a stone and, if they're like most landlords who just own maybe 1-2 properties, they probably also lose their home as well because they default on the mortgages of all their properties.

And then the state can buy them all on the cheap and the landlords can get themselves productive jobs. Success all round!

You do realize that most landlords do have other jobs too. Being a landlord is a sidegig. Most landlords own 1, maybe 2, additional rentals that make them a small amount of money after the mortage and bills are taken care of. If they're lucky, maybe its enough to cover the mortgage on their own home. They do not in any way deserve the vitriol that you are flinging their direction.

Its only a tiny minority of landlords who are fat cats sitting in a mansion somewhere with buckets of cash they make from 'abusing their poor tenants'. We're not living in a Charles Dicken's novel.

I really couldn't care less. All renting at profit is harmful. If it's your main job, tough. If it's a side-gig for holiday money, tough.

Too bad the world doesn't, and will never, work like that. Tough to be you I guess.

Again, I suggest moving to Venezuela. It sounds right up your alley.

You'll remember I said I own two houses, right? Not really flag-waving communist stuff. Bash on with the ad hominem misfires, though.

 Excommunicatus wrote:

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:


Yes it is. This is fun, your turn.

I bear absolutely no burden. Your claim, your burden. I have refuted it on exactly the same ground it was advanced; naked assertion.

Nobody thinks you got your rental property handed to you. We think you got it by exploiting the labour of others.

I literally posted an example of how it favours tenants in the post before. Eg, I can't charge them 2 months rent up front, meaning if they are so inclined they can just up and leave at the end of their final month sans payment, and I can do nothing about it.

Fair enough, you're entitled to your misguided opinion. I'll just sit here with my property, ready to sell when I need to buy my own house, so who's the fool?

Grey Templar: I started with my goalposts there, thank you. It tackles the large corporations and buy to let landlords while still leaving a rental market for people in temporary situations.

I think it is a good solution. I am not actually out to get "the majority" of people, just to solve the problem of excessively high house prices and people being stuck in the trap of renting.

I am not a communist, just a social democrat who thinks important stuff should be well regulated for the public good.

But since your solution only deals with a small minority of landlords, it won't have the effect on housing prices you seem to think it will.

I think you're also a little blinded by thinking that renting should only ever be temporary, that is a big assumption that I think you should reexamine. People have lived their entire lives renting the place they live, its been done for thousands of years. Its not perfect, but it is a workable system.

nfe wrote:

You'll remember I said I own two houses, right? Not really flag-waving communist stuff. Bash on with the ad hominem misfires, though.

Yeah. So if you view landlording as some heinous evil that is not only morally reprehensible but should also be banned, why are you contributing to the problem by being an evil landlord yourself?

 Grey Templar wrote:

nfe wrote:

You'll remember I said I own two houses, right? Not really flag-waving communist stuff. Bash on with the ad hominem misfires, though.

Yeah. So if you view landlording as some heinous evil that is not only morally reprehensible but should also be banned, why are you contributing to the problem by being an evil landlord yourself?

I'm not convinced you're really reading me. I object to renting at profit and to people having unoccupied housing. I do not object to people owning multiple occupied properties. We have multiple occupied properties.

 Grey Templar wrote:
People have lived their entire lives renting the place they live, its been done for thousands of years.

Wait what? I realise my I'm a pedantic archaeologist bell is going off here, but exactly how are you defining 'rent' here?

It is workable, but it is economically inefficient and entrenches inequality.

I am Irish, we have a painful history with Landlordism. It resulted in the population of my country dropping by 75%.

The Irish Potato famine was really a combination of factors, of which landlording was only a small portion. Boiling it down to "landlords are evil" is disingenuous and ignorant of what was a complex chain of events.

nfe wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

nfe wrote:

You'll remember I said I own two houses, right? Not really flag-waving communist stuff. Bash on with the ad hominem misfires, though.

Yeah. So if you view landlording as some heinous evil that is not only morally reprehensible but should also be banned, why are you contributing to the problem by being an evil landlord yourself?

I'm not convinced you're really reading me. I object to renting at profit and to people having unoccupied housing. I do not object to people owning multiple occupied properties. We have multiple occupied properties.

No, I'm reading you. You're just not making sense.

I'm assuming you're not managing your rentals as a charity. That you're charging a rent which turns you a profit. But according to everything else you're saying renting to people for profit is evil. So why are you doing something you consider evil? Maybe I'm wrong and you are renting at cost and doing all the extra work that comes from being a landlord for free, but that is quite a fanciful assertion that I and most people would have a hard time believing if you say its true.

All landlords who have any sort of brain will object to having an unoccupied unit, weather they own 1 unit or 500 units. That's a unit that isn't making them any money. Its not like a landlord whose primary business is making money off of rental income wants an unoccupied space. Landlords don't want to have to evict tenants. They want tenants who pay the rent and don't damage the property. The best scenario for a landlord is to have a long term tenant who never causes any problems and gives no reason for eviction.

The only thing that really causes issues with this scenario is when doing something other than renting to long term tenants is more profitable. Like having an AirBnB that you can charge $300 a day for to tourists instead of $1500 a month to a long term renter.

Thats the sort of thing that should be clamped down on. Thats what really will drive up housing prices(both to own and rent). I don't blame the landlords for doing that though. But it is something that should be looked at for restrictions. I might look at saying an individual could only have some arbitrary number of AirBnB units at a time rather than limiting the number of rentals they can have overall.

 Excommunicatus wrote:
While I agree 100% that 'landlords' are moochers, the situation isn't so bad in Canada as it is in the U.K..

Specifically in Ontario, where I now live, tenants have very, very strong protections from predators and I'm advised the situation is much the same from Newfoundland to B.C..

The rental scene in the U.K. is, by comparison, a shark-tank.

Now that sentiment is just not okay as a generalization.
And generally depends more on the socio economic structure of the region you are trying to rent.

 Grey Templar wrote:
The Irish Potato famine was really a combination of factors, of which landlording was only a small portion. Boiling it down to "landlords are evil" is disingenuous and ignorant of what was a complex chain of events.

nfe wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

nfe wrote:

You'll remember I said I own two houses, right? Not really flag-waving communist stuff. Bash on with the ad hominem misfires, though.

Yeah. So if you view landlording as some heinous evil that is not only morally reprehensible but should also be banned, why are you contributing to the problem by being an evil landlord yourself?

I'm not convinced you're really reading me. I object to renting at profit and to people having unoccupied housing. I do not object to people owning multiple occupied properties. We have multiple occupied properties.

No, I'm reading you. You're just not making sense.

I'm assuming you're not managing your rentals as a charity. That you're charging a rent which turns you a profit.

And you are wrong. My explicitly saying earlier that I wouldn't want to prevent people having homes their family or friends stay in should have been your clue.

My girlfriend's family live in one. They pay bills. We're actually about to buy another, which we will live in (moving back and forth between where we live now and there every two-three months for work reasons). If, at a later date, we end up just living in one of them, then, depending on which one we're not living in, we will sell the other or keep it and rent it for the cost of council tax and bills to a PhD student or visiting academic in my old university, as a colleague of mine does already.






Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Grey Templar wrote:
.

All landlords who have any sort of brain will object to having an unoccupied unit, weather they own 1 unit or 500 units. That's a unit that isn't making them any money. Its not like a landlord whose primary business is making money off of rental income wants an unoccupied space. Landlords don't want to have to evict tenants. They want tenants who pay the rent and don't damage the property. The best scenario for a landlord is to have a long term tenant who never causes any problems and gives no reason for eviction.

Sorry but you are wildly incorrect. Many landlords with significant numbers of properties purposefully keep many empty to drive up prices. This is an severe problem in the UK, especially London, for example.

My girlfriend's family live in one. They pay bills. We're actually about to buy another, which we will live in (moving back and forth between where we live now and there every two-three months for work reasons). If, at a later date, we end up just living in one of them, then, depending on which one we're not living in, we will sell the other or keep it and rent it for the cost of council tax and bills to a PhD student or visiting academic in my old university, as a colleague of mine does already.

" but i do it for a better cause "
"my second domicile in walis is perfectly fine and does not disturb the village life by beeing empty all the time"

Is literally hilarious contrasted with your own standards.
Altough empty unit tactics are of course a issue, people with double living units then required are equally as bad, especially if they do not even fill the unit propperly.

Ha! thanks for explaining my own history to me.

I am willing to bet I know a lot more about the Irish Potato Famine and the underlying economic system that allowed it to happen than you do.

Not Online!!! wrote:

My girlfriend's family live in one. They pay bills. We're actually about to buy another, which we will live in (moving back and forth between where we live now and there every two-three months for work reasons). If, at a later date, we end up just living in one of them, then, depending on which one we're not living in, we will sell the other or keep it and rent it for the cost of council tax and bills to a PhD student or visiting academic in my old university, as a colleague of mine does already.

" but i do it for a better cause "
"my second domicile in walis is perfectly fine and does not disturb the village life by beeing empty all the time"

Is literally hilarious contrasted with your own standards.
Altough empty unit tactics are of course a issue, people with double living units then required are equally as bad, especially if they do not even fill the unit propperly.

Our jobs are 400 miles apart and we will have an infant by that point. We'll be continually moving back and forth between Glasgow and London and whilst we're lucky to have the capital to purchase, we'd burn it if we had to rent or continually stay in hotels in London to cover when we need to be there. We'd far rather live in the same place and remove the issue but we're in the same field and it has very few jobs in the UK.

We'll pay full council tax in both all the time rather than seeking exemptions that legally we are entitled to, and, as I said earlier, I think our council tax when each isn't occupied should be much higher than it is. I'd happily pay it. We should have to.

nfe wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

My girlfriend's family live in one. They pay bills. We're actually about to buy another, which we will live in (moving back and forth between where we live now and there every two-three months for work reasons). If, at a later date, we end up just living in one of them, then, depending on which one we're not living in, we will sell the other or keep it and rent it for the cost of council tax and bills to a PhD student or visiting academic in my old university, as a colleague of mine does already.

" but i do it for a better cause "
"my second domicile in walis is perfectly fine and does not disturb the village life by beeing empty all the time"

Is literally hilarious contrasted with your own standards.
Altough empty unit tactics are of course a issue, people with double living units then required are equally as bad, especially if they do not even fill the unit propperly.

Our jobs are 400 miles apart and we will have an infant by that point. We'll be continually moving back and forth and whilst we're lucky to have the capital to purchase, we'd burn it if we had to rent in London to cover when we need yo be there. We'd far rather live in the same place and remove the issue but we're in the same field and it has very few jobs in the UK.

We'll pay full council tax in both all the time rather than seeking exemptions that legally we are entitled to, and, as I said earlier, I think our council tax when each isn't occupied should be much higher than it is. I'd happily pay it. We should have to.

Not the point.
The point is you occupy and not fill propperly, removing supply from the market.
What does empty unit tactics do? Removing supply from the market.

What does that lead to?

Also paying tax is not fething solving the issue since the government generally does not solve the issue.

In fact as an exemple even Zürich with a oh so left leaning policy of building more cheap space to rent to keep prices low has actually not solved anything and rather produced clientel for it's Party. Having solved no issue.
Other exemple Zug, right leaning this time, the only positive thing to say is that they didn't waste tax money for clientelism.