# Rent strike in the USA **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [May 1, 2020, 2:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rent-strike-in-the-usa/852981 "2020-05-01T14:42:55Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2020, 7:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rent-strike-in-the-usa/852981/81 "2020-05-05T07:52:10Z")
> [@Do\_Not\_Taunt](#): > > Heh, yeah, you tell 'em. Wait, you’re serious, aren’t you? > > This is ridiculous. You could make a fair case that _land_ itself should not be ownable, and there are sane societies that are built on top of that principle. But no one really cares about the land anymore. This isn’t 14th century France where everyone is renting a couple acres from the baron and trying to scrape out a living. What people rent is the improvement on the land - the structure and everything that comes with it. If I build that structure, I produced that value - I should be able to rent it out. If I commission someone else to build it, I produced the surplus value over what I paid the builders, and I should be able to rent it out. If I buy it from someone who did one of the above, I should be able to rent it out. Value is produced there. Livable buildings don’t construct themselves, and they aren’t built by 22 year-olds who just graduated college and need somewhere to live. > > I rented for years before I bought a condo. I never once resented my landlord or felt like they were a parasite leeching off of me. I got what I wanted out of it - a functional place to live with no commitment beyond (what was usually) a twelve-month lease. That’s a valuable service to a young man in a new city. I get that you can have bad landlords who game every inch of things to the tenant’s detriment, and go ahead and condemn them. But to claim all landlords are parasites - not even close to true. I totally agree that if you build some place it’s reasonable to rent it out **until the people who built it have recouped costs** (throw in a small profit if you must). A rent-to-own scheme is not what’s at issue here. But how many honest to goodness rent-to-own apartments and houses do you think people actually encounter? They’re very rare. Sure, occasionally someone who rents a place for 10 straight years will buy the place off the landlord, and sometimes at a substantially discounted rate, but as a rule rental land is designed to be rented in perpetuity far past the actual value-added improvements to the lot. And no, I don’t think any land should be privately owned (perhaps publicly protected, such as nature preserves and such, but no private ownership of the land itself). > [@Deeg](#): > > Landlords provide a great service: they allow people to live in homes that are way better than they’d otherwise be able to afford. Think about a recent college grad: they’re just starting out in life; who knows where they’ll end up living. Without landlords they’d only be able to afford a hovel; same with working-class families that are saving up for a down payment. Landlords also provide mobility; one of the problems in the Great Recession was that some home-owners (like in Las Vegas) were underwater and couldn’t afford to move to where the jobs where. Renters didn’t have this problem. And yet this wouldn’t be a problem if we dealt away with ideas such as “for some reason you must spend money to live with a roof over your head.” When I say “landlords are parasitic” I’m not saying everyone should be dropping fat downpayments on homes and taking mortgages. I’m saying peoples housing needs should be met, full stop, and nobody should be risking homelessness because they don’t have a job. > [@](#): > > Landlords are not a product of land shortage. Roughly [25% of rural housing is rental (PDF)](http://www.ruralhome.org/storage/research_notes/rrn_rural_rental_housing.pdf) where land is relatively cheap. When did I say that? I said almost the opposite: we have plenty of housing available, landlords and people who hang onto their empty homes because they’ve yet to find a “good” price, and people upselling and flipping homes to gentrify areas are creating (not a product of) a completely artificial shortage that causes people to not have homes, despite more than enough actual dwellings being available. If you want statistics, in 2010 [there were about 6 homes per homeless person](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/post_733_b_692546). I highly doubt the number has gotten much better. And yes this isn’t a perfect metric, I’m sure there are some homes where nobody needs one, and maybe a couple areas where no homes physically exist where there are people, but by and large there are a huge number of places for homeless people to live if we didn’t expect them to come up with cast, a security deposit, and a guarantee they can support their rent in perpetuity just to get a place to live. > [@epbrown01](#): > > This is nonsensical. That’s like saying a farmer is providing you food (a basic necessity) but no inherent service, since you still have to cook dinner. It’s the usual crypto-elitist toxic socialism of the privileged, where coffee beans should be free but a barista with a liberal arts degree should make $50k a year because _she’s_ adding value. Like I said above, I have no issue with rent-to-own schemes where the people (carpenters, electricians) etc rent out a unit until their costs are met (again, add a small profit if needed). That’s adding actual value. Likewise, food requires significant labor to produce in terms of growth, resources, etc and it’s reasonable to have a cost associated with it. Now, if you want my hardcore unrealistic opinions: I think most work is a spook, and COVID itself has proven the economy is largely illusory anyway and we could get away with orders of magnitude less work than our society actually demands. Most jobs are not in any way essential to our survival (I recognize that “essential services” open now are not all that’s needed to keep society running on their own, but that line is far closer to what’s operating now than the jobs that exist during normal operations), and given nothing else to do humans will happily pursue endeavors that are of benefit to humanity. Entertainment, science, software, art, clothesmaking, whatever will all be produced without the spook that is money being required to live a decent life, so I don’t particularly see a need to keep up this farce that you need to make up some positions just to justify giving someone a home and food. And the more advanced our science gets (crop science, materials science, automation, whatever) the more of a farce it becomes to require everyone to have money to live a comfortable life. The fact of the matter is, yes there are some people who have to work: farmers, distribution chains, people who make buildings or tools necessary for production etc. But that number is far, far smaller than the number of people who work. And it’s not noble to force everyone to work to survive just because some small amount of labor is necessary to live. That doesn’t mean I vote to make some small number of “essential” service workers slaves, it means I think there are alternate routes towards making sure our needs as a society are met without maintaining some bizarre system that requires people to do what amounts to busywork to justify their existence on the planet. ---
**Author:** ![chappachula](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/d2c977/32.png) [@chappachula](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chappachula)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2020, 8:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rent-strike-in-the-usa/852981/82 "2020-05-05T08:53:49Z")
> [@Jragon](#): > > I think most work is a spook, and COVID itself has proven the economy is largely illusory anyway and we could get away with orders of magnitude less work than our society actually demands. > given nothing else to do, humans will happily pursue endeavors that are of benefit to humanity. > > yes there are some people who have to work: farmers, distribution chains, people who make buildings or tools necessary for production etc. But that number is far, far smaller than the number of people who work. As long as we’re going way off topic, may I ask: how old are you? And how naive? You do realize that you are posting on the internet, which costs money? So you are using other people’s “useless” labor:web developers,search engine optimizers, and mostly–the advertisers who post ads for all kinds of stuff which nobody needs,but which is produced by workers doing all that useless work you abhor. But that’s what pays for it all, so you and I can keep on chatting here… And of course, there are those terrible landlords who rent the office space and computers to whoever currently operates this site for the benefit of humanity. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Jasmine](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jasmine/32/2964_2.png) [@Jasmine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jasmine)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2020, 11:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rent-strike-in-the-usa/852981/83 "2020-05-05T11:41:28Z")
It’s all about perceived worth. This crisis has shown that the people we have made fabulously rich and upon whom we shower so much admiration and awe are, in reality, totally unnecessary to our daily human existence as individuals and as a society as a whole. In fact, they are pretty much useless. “Non-essentials”, I believe, is the proper term. The people who matter the most and who have kept our society running at no mean risk to their personal safety are the ones we underpay and devalue. Yet, we give the former huge tax breaks and endless legal and social indulgence. Until our attitudes as a society change, no “movement” stands a snow ball’s chance in hell of being successful. ---
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2020, 12:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rent-strike-in-the-usa/852981/84 "2020-05-05T12:36:48Z")
> [@Jasmine](#): > > It’s all about perceived worth. This crisis has shown that the people we have made fabulously rich and upon whom we shower so much admiration and awe are, in reality, totally unnecessary to our daily human existence as individuals and as a society as a whole. In fact, they are pretty much useless. “Non-essentials”, I believe, is the proper term. The people who matter the most and who have kept our society running at no mean risk to their personal safety are the ones we underpay and devalue. Yet, we give the former huge tax breaks and endless legal and social indulgence. Until our attitudes as a society change, no “movement” stands a snow ball’s chance in hell of being successful. I wouldn’t go quite to that extreme. The Jeff Bezos’ and even the dirty, rotten hedge fund manager are useful and beneficial – up to a point. We benefit from their innovations and their improvements to efficiency if nothing else. What I object to is the notion that they’re hundreds of times more valuable than the rest of us and that they get to live by a different set of rules. Yes, the creation of an idea and a product that we can all reap rewards from should reward its proprietors handsomely. But what we don’t want is for those rewards to turn into anti-competitive leverage. And there’s a very easy way to tell if they’ve already got that kind of leverage: just look at wealth and income inequality, and we can see that they do. Up to a point, the billionaire class literally profits when the working class declines. That is something that is simply untenable in the long term. I see the rent strike as a shot across the bow, a first wake up call. People have a natural built-in ‘fairness meter,’ and there will come a point when they’ve had enough. On the flip side, the typical reaction of the elite class is to seek greater means of control and suppression to enforce their inequality - through violent suppression if necessary. Why do you think Republicans want to suppress the vote? Why are they essentially winking and nodding at Russian interference? ---
**Author:** ![Oredigger77](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/oredigger77/32/3181_2.png) [@Oredigger77](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Oredigger77)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2020, 12:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rent-strike-in-the-usa/852981/85 "2020-05-05T12:40:18Z")
> [@Jasmine](#): > > It’s all about perceived worth. This crisis has shown that the people we have made fabulously rich and upon whom we shower so much admiration and awe are, in reality, totally unnecessary to our daily human existence as individuals and as a society as a whole. In fact, they are pretty much useless. “Non-essentials”, I believe, is the proper term. The people who matter the most and who have kept our society running at no mean risk to their personal safety are the ones we underpay and devalue. Yet, we give the former huge tax breaks and endless legal and social indulgence. Until our attitudes as a society change, no “movement” stands a snow ball’s chance in hell of being successful. Ok, I’ve seen this repeated elsewhere and I just don’t understand what you’re talking about. There are currently three tiers of jobs in society. We’ve got the people you’re calling essentials, I think, who have jobs that must be done in person and are necessary to keep society functioning, we’ve got people who’s jobs are essential to keep society functioning but can be done from home, and we’ve the people you’ve termed pretty much useless who’s jobs are not essential and must be done in person. Somehow you seem to be conflating the third group with the fabulously weathly and think we shower them with awe and affection. From what I can see that third group is waiters, hairdressers, tattoo artists, bartenders, and people in the travel and hospitality industry none of those groups fit either of those criteria in my mind. If feels like you are ranting about the second group that includes everyone from multibillionaire hedge fund managers to teachers who are all working from home keeping our economy limping along at 80%. I’m in this group too, probably one of the people you think you’re ranting about, I’m an executive at a company making hand sanitizer and I’ve been working 60-80 hour weeks for the last 6 weeks trying to get more sanitizer to first responders my billionaire boss has put in more hours than me every single week and I can just feel you’re talking about him but I have no idea what you’re trying to say. As far as how this ties into the rent strike, I’m not certain, maybe when you explain who you’re talking about and what they’ve done you can tie it together. Its probably less crazy than the government owning all property and giving 99 year leases to people at the cost of the construction. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2020, 12:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rent-strike-in-the-usa/852981/86 "2020-05-05T12:58:26Z")
> [@septimus](#): > > I think yours is a _reductio ad absurdem_ on smiling bandit’s, but IIRC New York’s City’s early fire departments were private profit-making enterprises. When businesses were slow they drummed up customers by setting fires! Betsy DeVos is doing her best to eviscerate public schools so profits prevail in that domain. And Wars in the Middle East were justified by “Think of all the free oil we’ll get!” > > Be careful what you wish for. How does my writing that I would prefer healthcare be run by a government agency with no profit motive indicate I’m wishing for the privatization of schools and firefighting? And something about the Middle East? ---
**Author:** ![Mdcastle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/958977/32.png) [@Mdcastle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mdcastle)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2020, 1:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rent-strike-in-the-usa/852981/87 "2020-05-05T13:36:30Z")
Anyone that thinks the government owning the housing instead of private landlords is a good idea should take a look at Cabrini Green, Soviet block flats, or even English council estates. I’ll take my single family detached house in the suburbs, thank you. ---
**Author:** ![puddleglum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puddleglum/32/137_2.png) [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2020, 2:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rent-strike-in-the-usa/852981/88 "2020-05-05T14:21:25Z")
> [@Jasmine](#): > > It’s all about perceived worth. This crisis has shown that the people we have made fabulously rich and upon whom we shower so much admiration and awe are, in reality, totally unnecessary to our daily human existence as individuals and as a society as a whole. In fact, they are pretty much useless. “Non-essentials”, I believe, is the proper term. The people who matter the most and who have kept our society running at no mean risk to their personal safety are the ones we underpay and devalue. Yet, we give the former huge tax breaks and endless legal and social indulgence. Until our attitudes as a society change, no “movement” stands a snow ball’s chance in hell of being successful. It is about marginal utility. Diamonds are not necessary to life at all but you would die an agonizing death without water for three days. Yet despite this a diamond ring is worth more than a bottle of water. This is because water is abundant and diamond rings are relatively scarce. Basketball players are not vital for any society and farmers are, yet basketball players are paid more than farmers. This is because the best basketball players are more rare than farmers. People who can organize groups of other people to perform useful functions are rare and therefore highly paid. Grocery clerks and truck drivers perform valuable jobs but their skills are not rare. ---
**Author:** ![puddleglum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puddleglum/32/137_2.png) [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2020, 2:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rent-strike-in-the-usa/852981/89 "2020-05-05T14:30:41Z")
> [@asahi](#): > > What I object to is the notion that they’re hundreds of times more valuable than the rest of us and that they get to live by a different set of rules. Yes, the creation of an idea and a product that we can all reap rewards from should reward its proprietors handsomely. But what we don’t want is for those rewards to turn into anti-competitive leverage. And there’s a very easy way to tell if they’ve already got that kind of leverage: just look at wealth and income inequality, and we can see that they do. This makes no sense. Different businesses create different potential reward. If I have the skills to make a good neighborhood sandwich restaurant, it might make me a millionaire. If I have the skills to create a global software company it might make me a billionaire. That does not imply that there are different rules or that those in the second business are acting anti competitively. The nature of the business is that the customers of the sandwich shop are restricted to those willing to drive to my neighborhood for food, and the customers of the software company is every in the world with a computer. Technology has made it easier for some types of companies to have many more customers than other types. This means more inequality. ---
**Author:** ![Kovitlac](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/2bfe46/32.png) [@Kovitlac](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kovitlac)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2020, 2:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rent-strike-in-the-usa/852981/90 "2020-05-05T14:49:52Z")
I’m more than a bit baffled by this idea for landlords do nothing and all sit on fat stacks of cash while they’re lowly peasant renters starve. I’m happy to rent right now, because I’m in no position to own my own home. Someday, yes, I will. But for now, I’m happy to pay a fairly low (for my area) amount of rent and never have to care about snow removal, lawn care, upkeep costs for the apartment, property tax, trash removal, water, the list goes on. And they did make an effort to help people who lost their jobs, although they aren’t in any more position to go rent-free than I am in a position to go pay-free for the sake of my employer. What do you think allows them to perform everything I listed earlier? Sure, you have landlords that was shitty people. Just like you have shitty retail managers, restaurant managers, movie theater managers, etc. That isn’t exactly new information to anyone. It’s a fact of life. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2020, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rent-strike-in-the-usa/852981/91 "2020-05-05T16:39:51Z")
> [@Mdcastle](#): > > Anyone that thinks the government owning the housing instead of private landlords is a good idea should take a look at Cabrini Green, Soviet block flats, or even English council estates. I’ll take my single family detached house in the suburbs, thank you. Of course you would prefer a nice house in the suburbs. Most people would. But we’re talking about urban housing projects for low income people. I think it’s an open question whether the government can do as good a job in providing that as private business can. There’s no question that we could find examples of privately owned rental properties that every bit as bad as the ones you mentioned. ---
**Author:** ![Kearsen1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Kearsen1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kearsen1)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2020, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rent-strike-in-the-usa/852981/92 "2020-05-05T16:48:05Z")
> [@Jragon](#): > > Cool, landlord is a parasitic role that leeches money off people for basically necessity while not providing any inherent service. > > There’s nothing wrong with charging a fee to clean and renovate a unit and facilitate transfer to a new party. There’s nothing wrong with being a service that provides the option subscribe to keep people on retainer to perform maintenance. But those are jobs that could exist and don’t need to be attached to sitting around and leeching money off people because they have the gall to want a place to live. > > If all my rent is doing is paying your property taxes and mortgage then why the fuck do I even have the middle man? The whole dynamic of a landlord deciding if I’m allowed to live somewhere, charging me a deposit, and dictating what I can do with my home to preserve the value of “their” land is inherently parasitic and adds absolutely no value to society. Again, if the landlord goes over to fix the plumbing, then they’re a plumber and can make money providing that service to a group of homes. If people don’t want to worry about cleaning a unit or finding someone else to live there then it’s reasonable to pay a service without the runaround of them keeping your security deposit in case you “ruin” “their” home, without directly paying them a fucking retainer while they skim off the top and pay what should be your own property taxes for you. > > “Working class landlord” isn’t nonsensical because there aren’t people who have other professions that are generally working class who are also landlords, it’s because landlordship is in itself not a fucking job and land ownership and rental places you in the rentier class by definition. > > There is no supply problem because there is enough space to house everyone, but homes sit unfilled due to ballooned rent prices and rich people take up absurd amounts of space. This is directly in parallel to how we produce more than enough food to feed the world, but economic reasons prevent us from actually just getting everyone fed. > > If you start from the premise that people need housing, then the problems suddenly become very easy to solve. For instance, converting giant mansions into cooperative housing (which is what plenty of, e.g., frat houses and such already are), or converting motels into permanent steady housing for the homeless. Places in the US **already** started doing this (at least wrt motels and such) during COVID because the rich people got so scared of the dirty poor and unhoused running around getting infected and spreading disease to their rich family, and played their hand that the only reason that these people do not have steady housing is basically because they didn’t feel like it. > > * * * > > Anyway, I’m not really sure how I feel about the rent strike itself. Given how landlords react and how much of the law is on their side, I really don’t know if this is really going to do anything other than make them mad. But if it hurts them boy I hope it **really** puts the landlords in a bind and makes them give major concessions. The ideal is outright dissolution of landlords in some areas instead replaced by common ownership or only allowing people to own a property they currently reside in (barring vacations), but that’s not gonna happen. I’d settle for severe lowering of prices, restriction on evictions, and some form of rent control. Ideally also dissolution of rent (and mortgages and property taxes, anything that could cause someone to become homeless due to financial issues) for the duration of the COVID-related economic fallout. Agreed, get rid of any and all rental units in the US. You can either afford the house (and have the good standing credit to get one) or GTFO! ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2020, 11:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rent-strike-in-the-usa/852981/93 "2020-05-05T23:34:39Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > How does my writing that I would prefer healthcare be run by a government agency with no profit motive indicate I’m wishing for the privatization of schools and firefighting? And something about the Middle East? As my first clause (“I think yours is a reductio ad absurdem on smiling bandit’s”) implied, I didn’t misunderstand your post. I discerned a tongue-in-cheek **Nemo** , and chose to answer that **Nemo** to make my own point, in support of yours. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rent-strike-in-the-usa/852981.md?page=4)