Since I am from a Europoor country, I don't have a lot of experience with landlordism, but from all that I understand it doesn't seem at all amoral or bad (well at least more amoral and bad than everything else under capitalism). I mean, the basic concept of being a landlord is no different than running a grocery store: one provides the desired good (food in the grocers example and place to live in landlords one, both of which are important needs for survival, hell, food is even more important than shelter). Also the landlord has to maintain the rented apartments, so can you truly say that they are not using their own labour? And yes, state run housing would be way better than the current system, but this is what we currently have, so is there some reason why landlordism is way more negative in particular and gets targeted more than other capitalistic practices?
Why is landlordism bad?
Landlords are not typically not capitalists. If they do not invest the rent they've earned into developing more land for the purpose of extracting more rent in the future then they are parasites on society. They do not expand the overall wealth of societies and even classical bourgeois economists hate landlords.
In Burgerland lots of people pay half their monthly income on rent. Get it now?
And I though burgers were poorly educated.
They have a janitor for that. If you own 5-7 apartments you can easily pay a janitor and still make lots of money by nothing but owning property. Many people haven't even seen or talked to their landlord because he outsourced everything to facility managers.
Also rent-seeking is shit because it doesn't even accumulate capital (e.g. develop the productive forces necessary for socialism). It's entirely parasitic.
As Marx pointed out, capitalism "masks" exploitation by paying the worker the full value of their labour power, while (pretty much post-feudal) rent-seeking is not only the most open form of exploitation, it also hurts the average worker the most in the 21st century - to rent an apartment in any Western city bigger than 100k inhabitants will eat up half your paycheck. Full time labourers who used to be able to rent out a small 2-room apartment now have to live in a shared flat with bunch of students.
Landlords are disgusting.
you can say a lot of things about burgers but at least we dont tolerate monarchy
Well, most of what I see from landlords in my country is them being brainlets and buying up a crap ton of apartments through taking loans right before global economic crashes. It happened in 2008, it seems to be starting to happen right now once again. Thus it is kind of hard to see a bunch of chud dipshits who go bankrupt every 10 years as some evil societal enemy
Song that explains
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landlords rarely build houses and if-and-when they do they extract a ridiculous premium on the construction cost.
furthermore most landlords do a shit job of maintaining the buildings.
landlordism is the most obviously parasitical of industries. one can say that the grocery store petit-bourg has a co-ordinating role in delivering goods from the producer to you, in storing those goods until you want them, etc. the landlord simply buys a property (which you'd have a much better chance of buying if landlord parasites weren't gobbling them up by the tens.) and charges you more than you'd be paying if you mortgaged it.
how often do you see landlords using their profits to build new houses, rather than just to bid up the existing stock?
we sure seem to tolerate hereditary officialdom and pretend capitalists have divine rights
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It's rent seeking (duh). A landlord makes money because he owns a piece of paper saying a building is his. Yes he pays other people to maintain the premises but he doesn't pay as much as he receives in rent (or else he'd sell the building). His profits have nothing to do with what he does to maintain the building, they come from the quality of the neighborhood around it which he had nothing to do with. That's why a 1 BR apartment in Manhattan will go for $3k a month while the same exact apartment would go for $300 a month in a poor rural area. The extra $2700 is completely unearned.
Even the most far right economists support a land value tax to eliminate this profit.
You're right in that it is no worse than most profit making under capitalism. It gets more hate because its so obviously crooked and most people have had bad experiences with landlords.
How in the hell do you find landlordism the least objectionable part of capitalism? Industrial capitalism is rife with contradictions but there is some value in it, rent-seeking is complete bullshit.
Landlords make up a purely extractive (money-wise) force that commodifies living space and have an interest in making people live in dirt. Very rarely do landlords ever "keep up" maintenance even in places where there are strict regulations, such as Berlin, where state-owned housing isn't for profit, and twice is much is spent on renovations and making the living conditions nicer.
The difference is that the grocer purchases goods from producers and then sells them. This encourages production and rewards labor.
The landlord, on the other hand, purchases Earth. Land. Land itself is a fixed resource. Instead of selling the land or even using it for production, the landlord holds it because doing so allows them to extract the largest possible profit from it without actually creating anything or investing in productive labor. They don't offer any goods or services to the market - their sole function is to restrict access to something they didn't create and everyone needs. They then extract money from people who labor via rent, because with enough landlords around the price of land goes up and those people don't have any choice but to rent from said landlords.
What about investing the initial funds to build a large multi-family house? Now many people can live on this piece of land and the construction costs will break even only in 10-15 years.
Is selling is the only viable choice to stay ethical?
You may have missed the point user.
I mean right now, not in the glorious socialist future.
Building a house, selling it when it's ready. Pure labor, no?
selling is better than renting for certain. assuming you built the house with your own labor, selling it for the cost of your labor rather than extracting excessive profit from it is the socialist thing to do. however, that doesn't make it the best choice right now in capitalist society. you should worry about what the socialist thing to do is when socialists have taken over society.