OK, buddy. I mean you can try to change the entire world, but I don't think you will have much success. Correction - I know you won't have any success.

You get nothing in return for your rent, except for the roof over your head (that apparently is so unimportant that it isn't worthy of consideration - yet you really do want to own the roof). A roof over your head that costs per month more than you pay per month (cap gains excluded).

Most private rentals make a loss, and the gain is at the end (I think that is silly, and tax reform can probably help with that). If/when you do get a house, you will find that your cost isn't just a mortgage, as you seem to think. It is mortgage + insurance + local council tax + regional council tax + maintenance. And when you take all of those into account, what you pay as rent is significantly less than the TCO of owning.

The only solution is to bring house prices down through increased supply and decreased cost of production. Making rentals go away is just idiocy. I have lived in rentals and owned houses at various times around the world, and not once when I was renting was I in a situation where I actually wanted to own in that location or at that time.

Link :improve-society:

Mao needs to take a trip to NZ

  • happybadger [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I have lived in rentals and owned houses at various times around the world, and not once when I was renting was I in a situation where I actually wanted to own in that location or at that time.

    I'm a very nomadic person. I'd still be living in a different country on a more or less yearly basis if I didn't now have a dog. When someone says something like this, I want to build a perpetual motion machine powered by kicking them in the head. Nothing about a nomadic lifestyle requires private property. You can still rent just fine from a municipality. That municipal housing will have actual standards for maintenance and an entire department to carry it out. It won't require that landlords sacrifice so much for taxation, while using those rents for the public good rather than the collection of feudal parasites you benefited. It will be built for need rather than profit, and reflecting the former means it won't cause the housing crisis that commodified housing does. Build an entire block of Stalinist housing with a quaint little market between it and bakeries underneath it like Bucharest, assign it to people as they come and go. The US military does that with its base housing and it would work if they funded it properly.