Not sure if this is just ingrained "American Dream" mentality but I want to get away from landlords and buy my own house. Partly this is so I can have my own space to work on my own projects, be messy, grow weed, walk around naked, etc. Lately this is looking like a real possibility since I've paid off my college debt and started saving money for a down payment. I'm also expecting house prices to fall in the next year as the economy implodes.

Despite all that, housing is still really expensive where I live and I probably wouldn't be able to afford a house without a partner or a roommate paying part of the mortgage. My romantic prospects aren't looking too good and I really don't want to be a landlord. And I don't know how I would feel buying a foreclosure. Not to mention I'd be locked into a 30 year mortgage that won't be paid off until after climate change has forced us all to migrate to Nunavut.

Tell me chapos, what's the moral thing to do here? Should I keep renting? Buy a house and try to be an "ethical" landlord? Move in with the next woman I meet after the 2nd date? Go join a commune/cult?

  • asaharyev [he/him]
    2·
    4 years ago

    Are your roommates who help pay your mortgage also gaining equity in your house?

    If no, then yeah, you're a landlord.

    • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]
      2·
      4 years ago

      What if they'd rather have money than equity in your house so they agree to sell their portion of the equity back to you every month? And what if they did that at the same time that they paid rent so that instead they just pay a lower rent without getting equity?

        • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]
          2·
          4 years ago

          If that's how that worked, I'd just buy a house and sell off equity I got from mortgage to pay my mortgage and live rent free myself.

          First off, not all the money you pay to the mortgage builds equity because you also have interest. Second off, if I'm staying in someone's spare room, I'm probably not contributing to the down payment for the mortgage, nor am I responsible for the debt if I decide to move. Naturally, I would expect to pay extra for someone else to deal with that.

            • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]
              2·
              4 years ago

              The point was that you can't actually do that because that's not how it works.

              I mean, technically I am defending landlordism insofar as I'm defending renting out a room in your house which technically makes you a landlord. If my friend offers to clear out their art room and let me move in in exchange for a monthly fee, I don't see why I should bring out the guillotines for them.

              Housing is absolutely a human right, but the people standing in the way of that are not the middle-manager landlords who own like 5% of the house they're renting out, it's the leeches at the top that they're paying their mortgages to. And yeah most middle-manager landlords tend to be assholes because the profession attracts them, but if you're like OP and you happen to find yourself in a position where it just makes sense to rent out a room, then that's not a factor. Additionally, if you're living with someone and treating them as a roommate, i.e. respecting them as an equal, that removes another layer of why landlords tend to be bastards. Add in the fact that if you live there, you have more of an incentive to actually fix things that break in a prompt fashion and... yeah I'm really not seeing the problem here.

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

                  Ok cool so if I have a single room in my house that I don't absolutely need then homelessness is my fault 🙄. I could also be working instead of posting so that I could earn more money to donate to any number of worthy causes so that makes me responsible for everything from world hunger to human trafficing. Or maybe, instead of expecting individual proles to solve structural problems, we could try actually assigning blame to the system and the people who designed it the way it is to serve themselves.

                  And I do have my reasons. My roommates and I have been looking at moving and one possibility we've considered having one person buy a place and working out a deal where the rest of us move in and rent. Since we may not always want to stick together, it doesn't really make sense for us to all be in on it. I wouldn't really have a preference in that scenario, except I might prefer to rent so that I wouldn't have to deal with all the hassle. Apparently Chapo thinks that if we did that then whichever one of us ended up in the role of having their names on the paper would be a horrible bastard exploiting the others, for some reason.

                  Another possibility was another friend who's married with kids was offering to let me move in, in exchange for doing the babysitting I get paid for now for free. I don't know if that's different somehow because I'd be paying with unpaid labor instead of with money?

                  I just think it's really dumb to condemn stuff like that or stuff like OP was suggesting just because you want to avoid the stain of being a landlord, without regard to the actual conditions involved. It's a very meme-level analysis imo.