Quick summary: I own my house. It's a 3 br, 2ba home, and I only use one bedroom and bathroom for myself. Recently a friend of mine proposed moving in. I've thought about it, and decided to offer them the other 2 rooms and bathroom to them for $500/month + half utilities.

I told another friend of mine (someone not directly involved) about this in passing, and they began to personally attack me for being a sham of a communist, and being a capitalist, and a landlord. They claim that what I'm asking for is steep. I understand essentially the place where their criticism is coming from, rent is a system of accumulation whereby I would be gaining wealth, and my friend would be receiving merely the permit to exist in my house. So on some level I understand and agree with the fact that this arrangement is essentially at odds with my beliefs.

Does this make me a sham? Brutal honesty please.

  • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    You're fine. Though hilariously, I've been called "pro-landlord" by someone on here for saying that this sort of thing is ok. To be clear, housing is a human right and property should be forcibly expropriated and redistributed whenever necessary to ensure that everyone has a place to live.

    But the problem of housing is not caused by individual actors and cannot be solved through individual actions. You could offer the room for free and it'd make a difference for that one person but at that point you may as well just give $500 to a random person on the street each month. Second, if you're living with them, you're probably in a similar boat financially and you're gonna want to take care of problems and shit. Third, nobody would give you shit if you just left the room empty. If you owned a bunch of houses that nobody could live in because you just wanted them for speculation, then people would rightfully be angry with you. But if people want to take issue with you, then they should take issue with anyone who has a spare room in their house they're not letting someone stay in for free, or hell, anyone who could have a bunkbed in their room that they could be letting someone sleep on. I'm probably never going to own a house, but if a friend offered me a good deal on rent on a spare room in their house, I'd be grateful, and as I see it it'd be totally unreasonable for me to get mad at them or think of them as an exploiter for it.

    If your friend wants to be like, "Hey, I wanna stay here long term, any chance we could do some kind of joint-ownership and get my name on the mortgage too?" then hey, that'd be a pretty cool thing for you to do. Otherwise, :shrug-outta-hecks: