The collecting of rent and interest has been around for over 2000yrs. most of our politicians collect rent. how much rent do you pay ?. every item or service has the cost of rent built into the price. the cost of a home is based on investment value. , so if rents are high property values are high. rents should be based on the lifestyle and comforts one receives being a tenant ,
20yrs ago I did an anonymous survey , I asked 100 small businesses to provide me with figures that included rental costs overall. most of the items/services had the cost of rent added. the average was around 30%, the cost of renting a property to start a business is based on the hard work and imagined profit you will make …Why do we need landlords. ?
Oh yes, there is all sorts of work being done, but doing the landlording aint part of it.
Even if the landlord wants to insist that they deserve recompense for their labours of repair or groundskeeping, this arrangement could certainly be made by the tenants. Indeed, the landlord could be paid an hourly wage by the tenants , rather than having any form of rent extraction — the landlord could receive an hourly wage, all at fair market (no such thing, but unimportant right now) rates, competitive to other groundskeepers, repairmen, lawnmowers, window washers, gutter cleaners, or whatever task the landlord is assigned by the tenants. This would result in the landlord being properly and fairly rewarded for the work that they put in with (solely) the hourly wage, multiplied by the number of hours of work they did (they can clock in and out under tenant supervision to ensure that the landlord is cleaning and not leaning). The landlords doing work would be properly rewarded for their labour! The tenants can then live rent free, and all instead proportionally chip in to ensure that the landlord is fairly and properly paid for each hour of his life was committed to producing and providing actual value for the building through his toil and labour. But something tells me that the landlords would not prefer this just and fair arrangement for their contributions of groundskeeping and repairs.
But hey, wait a second — what about the paperwork? What about the various laws and issues and contracts and obligations that a landlord has to deal with — isn’t that work? Yes, like groundskeeping and repairs, it actually is, but there’s two problems. First, is that most landlords opt to skip this, by taking a fraction of their rent extractions and giving it to a property manager, who then do the paperwork, hire the repairmen, etc, so that the landlord is free to sit on his ass and collect rent cheques without having to do anything at all. All the laws — the property relations under capitalism — are fully upheld even in the landlord spends the entire month in bed, playing video games, or at the golf course. The tenants still owe him the rent at the first of each month. Even less the property manager and repairs and maintenance and taxes, the remaining rent extractions are all still pure profit for the landlord, regardless of any material contributions that they put in, and with a competent property manager (or entire property management business) running things, landlording becomes nothing but regular extractions for the landlord.
Do you Own or Rent?
The landlord is not being paid for the work that they do (there is no wage or salary), they are being paid via the wealth extractions from rent — a decidedly different form of payment that is utterly contingent on the societal property relations at the base, that is (in its current form): capitalism. If the tenants instead were the ones to hire the property manager, the same as they could for the groundskeeping or repairs, then they can again eliminate the rent payments altogether, using a small fraction of it to pay the property manager hourly for their labour to manage the affairs, do the paperwork, etc. Everybody involved wins except for the parasites — the landlords, and the equally vile institution over and above them who expect and collect their wealth extractions from many of those same landlords — the banks, and other institutions of late finance capitalism (which is, as Lenin pointed out, necessarily imperialism, which really is the worst sort of capitalism). Just like the landlords, they too are trying to get a free lunch out of the works and labours of the tenants — with many of the landlord class serving as the sleazy middlemen for financial institutions, when they themselves don’t have sufficient capital to operate as independent owners.
But what about the banks role in all of this, the landlords decry. “Banks hold mortgage and loan claims over landlords — they feel the pressure too, just like the tenants they exploit!” There are, of course, numerous problems with this. The first and most obvious of which is that you virtually never see the landlords attempting to ‘punch upwards’ by using their power or voice to fervently go after the banks — they much prefer the safer strategy of focusing their punching downwards, applying the same pressure applied to them back down upon the tenants. Landlords being beholden to banks and financial powers above them does not absolve them, it’s only offers further criticism of their existence. On the rare occasions when landlords do speak negatively of banks, it is rarely of the institution, nor of capitalism, but more commonly conspiracy theories of bankers