it’s literally the idea that rent is essentially insurance on your major appliances. like that’s it. rent extraction is supposed to be fair because “some people don’t want to deal with the responsibility of home ownership and maintenance” or “some people can’t afford to replace appliances on their own,” obviously ignoring that you could just…save some of the profit that would have been extracted from you otherwise.
Why do so many people still think that renting is beneficial in any capacity to the tenant.
i think this is a symptom of a series of broader social ills. our economy is obfuscated by the “objectivity” of money, people have batshit insane ideas about how the world works because they’re educated wrong (in particular about history and the inherent importance of economic conditions informing what happens), and they don’t have the capacity for noticing this because we’re all radical individuals. if people are properly understood as members of their social groups, then grinding a ton of young Black people in the u.s. into homelessness and then the prison system is an obvious problem. if everyone is, on the other hand, primarily an individual, then you don’t even have to notice this really. you just don’t even see it if your social group is one of the protected ones, when someone falls out of it their personal failings are to blame. if you aren’t in one of those privileged groups, you still lack the tools for a systemic analysis, so you just watch on in reactionary horror as people you know get sucked into the meat grinder, helplessly hoping that you aren’t next.
In my experience it’s less that you “ask” them to fix it, it’s that you get on your knees and beg them to fix it, while spending $15 a day at the laundromat.
I really expected things to break a lot more often in my house from how people talk about that, but yeah, they really don’t. In a year and a half since we moved in, we’ve had a single unexpected repair. The house is 70 years old.
As long as you keep up with very basic maintenance, 95% of the costs will be the mortgage.
i definitely don’t day dream about an affordable housing model where a reasonable amount of money is set aside for maintenance and tenants otherwise pay an equitable fraction of the literal mortgage (or better, just the property tax). imagine if a government took over every rental, paid off the banks some fraction of the mortgage, and just charged tenants for property tax and maintenance. :mao-clap:
honestly, i don’t think we should pay off the banks for the nationalization of commercial mortgages that they own. but if you don’t, and you aren’t doing an entire restructuring of society to boot, they’ll do what they always do and tank production to starve the poors so that the line can still go up. and that would be bad probably.
Are you planning to picket Tesco because they make profit off food that people need to live?
:sicko-yes:
It still blows my mind that the House of Commons is entirely made up of lords, and nobody is bothered by it.
hard earned property value
:data-laughing:
