I guess I’m “the man” as well. Last year, I moved away from New York City for reasons that were largely financial. It was not a good time to sell my apartment so I’m renting it out.
My tenant makes more money than I made in my best year, which is about 5x of my current income. Most of the rent I receive goes towards mortgage and building common charges. After I pay those I clear $250 a month. I’ve spent about $1000 on repairs so far this year (one major one, I hope that’s it). So this is not a money-making venture. Nor was it intended as one, it was just a way to hang on to the place for its investment value.
Not all landlords are big faceless corporations. And this idea of a general rent strike is a huge disservice to anyone that can’t legitimately pay their rent, it weakens their case and muddies the waters.
Even in my current situation I could afford to give my tenant a few months forbearance if he needed it and I would, although he doesn’t. But not paying your bills is a dumb thing to do as an act of protest because it just looks self-serving.
Landlords have to look at this as: Should I let this tenant/business who can’t pay rent because of the pandemic stay, in hopes of them being able to pay after the economy recovers, or evict them, which means I will definitely not be collecting any rent, because I have no hope of getting a replacement tenant until after the economy recovers.
I was a landlord for almost 20 years on a condo I bought with an insurance settlement. I sold my place last spring to pay the down payment on the home I live in now. I can honestly say I would rather have no tenant with no prospect of a new tenant then one living there rent free. Tenants cost money every day whether they walk in the house with muddy shoes, miss the toilet at 2 am or have 50 things plugged into an outlet. It is cheaper to have the place empty.
I have nothing but sympathy to people who have lost their jobs or had their incomes destroyed. I don’t think that eviction moratoriums make sense since its not like they are going to get back pay. The rent strikers make it worse because you can’t tell who needs help and who’s sticking it to the man.
I know plenty of construction workers who bust ass a good 20-30 years, save their cash, and start out with one little rental property, which over time may give them cash to buy another one. It becomes their retirement. They are not the problem.
Vulture investors are the problem. They buy up properties in a market, and pretty soon, they become the market. They come in and buy up properties on a large scale - often with straight up cash - and they drive the rents up. They’re bad for both “working class landlords” and renters because they’re anti-competitive.
And yet they are going to get screwed over just as hard as anyone else, or harder.
Work all your life, save your money, and then get f*cked hard because some left-wing fruitcakes with the economic insights of a Girl Scout cookie den mother hate somebody else for expecting people to pay for what they get.
"Sorry to ruin your retirement, buddy, but you know that guy who put up the money so you could work as a construction worker putting up buildings? We hate him. You just got in the way.
Sux to be you, of course, but it’s more important to punish people for generating jobs and housing than actually, you know, generating jobs or housing. Maybe you can get a government handout for pennies on the dollar."
These housing activists aren’t going in the same order, but they seem to have the same idea.
That guy or that gal is going to be screwed over a lot harder by the capitalists, and I’m not using ‘capitalist’ to refer to those who embrace free markets but rather those who use excess capital to not only make capital but effectively take reduce everyone else’s capital.
Again, don’t look at the rent strike as an attack on each and every landlord; it’s an attack on financial institutions and investors who are running away with bags of money and taking over our political system. It’s a broader attack on modern capitalism itself, which is a losing proposition for an increasing number of people.
This is the way that working class people peacefully protest. This is a warning. Keep fucking with them, and it’ll stop being peaceful.
He or she is getting screwed over now. Why is it better to get screwed by housing activists and lose your retirement?
Don’t look on it as what it is? Bullshit. Read the article linked to in the OP.
“Keep fucking with them” in the sense of expecting them to pay their own rent?
You want to fuck over your landlord and issue threats? Not interested.
When Joe Sixpack tells me about some squatter in his rental unit who won’t pay rent, he better get his ass out quick, or you are damn right it’ll stop being peaceful. Maybe not the way he expects, but not very peaceful.
It’s not to eliminate wealth, but the goal is to redistribute wealth and to reinvest it. Democracy, any system of collective self-rule is destined to fail unless we do so.
It’s like the Ten Years After song: Tax the rich, feed the poor/'Til there are no rich no more. No, that’s wrong. The problem isn’t that there are rich people in the world; the problem is that there are poor people in the world.
I would have no problem living in a world in which everyone has enough food and shelter and other necessities of life - and some people are billionaires and own mansions and yachts. As long as everyone has enough, why worry that some people have more than enough?
It’s a problem because generally it’s easier to do something destructive than to do some productive. So if people decide that harming the rich and helping the poor are the same thing, then they’re going to take the lazy path and harm the rich. It’s a lot of work to build a house for Habitat for Humanity but it’s easy to burn down a mansion.
It’s actually a good question, Nemo: really, what is the goal?
In my view, the ‘goal’ is to first get enough people to realize that our political and social hierarchy shouldn’t be determined by one’s ability to amass and concentrate wealth. Beyond that, I’d like us to get to the point where some of the wealth that individual laborers produce go back to the laborer, not necessarily in the form of direct redistribution of profits, but in the form of high - like pretty damn high - wealth taxation and reinvestment in public resources that everyone can use.
Is a rent strike necessarily a good way to achieve that? By itself, no, it’s not. It’s noise. But noise is often necessary to get the attention of others. The same is true for the strikes at Amazon, Target, and others. And if paramedics, grocery store workers, and other front-line workers want to join them, I would not stand in their way.
But in the end, you have a point in that protesting by itself isn’t enough. We have to be able to crystallize what the outcome is. The Sanders progressives have somewhat laid out some ideas: healthcare for all and a higher minimum wage. I happen to disagree with both; I’d rather simply have really high taxation on the top 5% of wealth holders and large corporations.
Rent strikes don’t necessarily produce that outcome, but they get attention, and the time for pretending that the economic growth gives Americans an equal payout is over. But that aside, I don’t think people are necessarily joining them if they aren’t feeling economically distressed. As I said, people don’t willfully think “I’m just not gonna pay the rent” unless they’re already deadbeats, or unless they’re really, truly wondering what the 3-6 months are going to be like. Maybe they’ve got the money in the bank, but as I said, people without incomes aren’t just thinking about what’s in their accounts now, but what it’s going to look like 3 months from now. Without a job, without income, that’s a pretty bleak picture. I mean, FFS, look at the mile-long lines in places like Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and cities all throughout the country. This is real. This is a Herbert Hoover moment, and we’re living in it. I’d say the rent strikes are just the beginning, and the vulture capitalists had better get some thick skin.
It’s not the existence of capital or capitalists that’s the problem; you have to concentrate capital to get a lot of good stuff done.
The issue when you get right down to it, is that we seem to have a HUGE class of people who have a set of skills and experience that are effectively worthless in a more or less free labor market.
This wasn’t a problem in say… 1960, because the world was still recovering from WWII, and American manufacturing was supplying the world with damn near everything. Anyone who could walk and chew gum could get a pretty decently paying manufacturing job somewhere and provide a middle class lifestyle for his family.
It wasn’t too much of a problem in say… 1910, because most people lived on farms or worked on farms, and the standard of living was lower.
But today, life is pretty stark for a kid graduating high school without plans to go to college, or who goes to college for a year or so and drops out. What are they qualified to do? Very little. And they’re competing for the same jobs with everyone else in that same boat, including a bunch of people who are older than them.
That’s the problem- the jobs we have that pay well are ones that require advanced academic and/or technical training, and if you don’t have that, you’re one of the faceless masses that are relegated to low skill, low expectation and consequently low pay jobs.
I’m not convinced that taking someone else’s money and handing it out is a very effective way of remedying that fundamental problem.
I’m starting to get a little protectionist as I get older; I think it wouldn’t be the worst thing to require certain items to be purchased from US suppliers- we see where buying masks from China got us.
It’s a sad truth that even the best things have consequences that can be bad.
I think everyone would agree that civil rights and equality are good things. But one effect they had was allowing a lot of people who had previously been shut out of the job market by prejudice to compete for jobs which had previously been reserved for white men. And basic economics kicked in; when you doubled the pool of potential workers, you decreased their individual bargaining position. Employers knew this and were able to drive down wages.
Okay, here’s four specific proposals which I feel would help:
A universal health care system. Health care should be seen as a public service like education or firefighting or law enforcement.
Overturn the Buckley v Valeo decision. It was bad law and it’s had terrible consequences. This would probably take a constitutional amendment at this point.
I don’t necessarily disagree. Yes, you need capital to get stuff done, to fund (invest) in innovation, and so forth. The mere existence of capital isn’t the problem. In fact, capitalism is good at creating wealth. The problem is that it creates a class of people who end up having radically different interests than the vast majority of those around them. Socialism produces a similar effect but through different means. In any system, there must be a way to redistribute power, whether it’s through term limits for bureaucrats in a socialist system or redistribution of wealth in a capitalist one.
Again, I would probably agree with this to some extent. Automation and AI are going to inevitably cause more displacement, and it also means that the average worker is more productive. Some of the wealth should be redistributed so that we can either increase wages or, if not wages directly, then invest in services and infrastructure that everyone can use.
Technological displacement of the labor force is not a new phenomenon, though. Going back to Ancient Rome, I believe it was Tiberius Gracchus (the first Bernie Sanders) who addressed this situation with a combination of public works programs. And the solution, I think, is something not unlike AOC’s proposal (not exclusively hers, I realize) “Green New Deal.” Invest in public works that are going to kick start economic growth. Invest in new wave tech training. Invest in education, particularly with a laser focus in under-served communities like inner cities and rural areas.
Agreed.
Not necessarily handing it out. I’m not sure I necessarily believe in Andrew Yang’s “freedom dividend” that would go to everyone, but at minimum, there should be some healthy redistribution through ‘investments’ in education, job training, and infrastructure development. And some handouts, like housing and food, may be necessary nevertheless.
Protectionism is not only bad for the economy, but it increases the risk of warfare. Countries are blessed and cursed by their geography and their natural advantages and disadvantages. And they’re of course blessed or cursed by the skill and education of their workforce, and the competence of their governance. But speaking purely in terms of the economics of geography and advantage, countries trade to swap their advantages. If they protect their resources, it impacts everyone else’s ability to trade, and if some of what is protected is considered vital to the survival of a regime, then it incites animosity and encourages countries to take what they can by brute force (see Japan 1940-41, Soviet Union, Iraq 1990, and so on - oh, and us of course). The late 19th and early 20th century trend away from global cooperation and toward competition is what led to 2 disastrous world wars. A third one could lead to our near extinction.
I’m only protectionist with respect to China because China is behaving badly, and there ought to be some way to punish them. Simultaneously, though, there ought to be a way to reward good behavior. One of the problems with the trade war is that it has not given China an off-ramp, which is probably one of the reasons (though not the only one) that China tried like hell to conceal the initial Wuhan outbreak. This is not meant to defend China, which has clearly worsened and become far more aggressive and nationalistic under Xi Jinping. But things like pulling out of the TPP and attacking other trading partners only exacerbate the situation.