this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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Those people are able to live in the house you took off the market (thus driving up the price of housing) and pay off your mortgage.
Are we talking about eliminating renting altogether?
Cause that is what it sounds like in this thread. Folks wanting to completely eliminate renting and drive folks to buy a house Everytime they move.
This ignores things like closing costs, realtor fees, really high property taxes, expensive home repairs, and temporary work assignments.
Maybe you really need a job but don't want to straight up buy a house and instead rent something until you can find a job back in your local area or you decide it's time to take the plunge and move for good.
Sure there are many a-hole companies and landlords that try to squeeze their tenants for every dime and treat their tenants like crap (lord knows I've run into those), but on the other hand there are folks who need a place to live but haven't decided where they want to settle down and people who can rent their old property at a decent date based on the low interest they themselves were able to lock down.
Some are folks (like me) who moved but couldn't afford to keep their house empty for an extended period of time to put it on sale while they're paying rent or a mortgage in another state. So renting, even if you're barely breaking even, makes sense.
Better to rent your old house for barely above the costs for the property taxes, homeowners insurance, and mortgage interest, and maintenance costs than to take a 6-12 month hit where you have to pay the above while not living in the house because your new job is in a different state. And that is if you sell in 12 months and don't take a big hit on the sale.
If you're buying/selling a house every 3 years then you're really going to get screwed. I personally went from living in a home I owned (and paying a mortgage on) to renting for 3 years just to understand where I wanted to live in a new state, which areas had the best employers, and wait out on a low APR and decent buyers market.
If I had to buy a house instead of having the option to rent, then I would have ended up buying a house near that employer which would have been over an hour commute from the better job offers I got after I moved here.
I've asked this very question before on reddit in a genuine attempt to understand what alternative the anti-landlord crowd is advocating for. Aside from the onslaught of personal attacks on my character, the best I could decipher was some sort of system where a landlord could only rent at actual cost of their mortgage, taxes, insurance, maintenance, etc. No profit could be earned. I said no one would be a landlord for free, especially considering the risks of owning land (natural disasters not insured, market crash, etc).
Their "landlords shouldn't profit off of renters" argument fell apart when I asked profit for who? Was the bank allowed to make a profit on the home loan? Was the insurance company allowed to make a profit on the policy? Could the maintenance and repair folks earn a profit on their services? Could the home remodeling companies make a profit if the home needed updating? Or is every person and entity involved in home ownership allowed to profit from the rental except the landlord? They stopped responding.
Your question is literally answered in a sibling comment.