How Landlords Ruined Everything
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- Опубліковано 10 чер 2024
- Support Shelter's vital work protecting renters from bad landlords by sponsoring me to run the London Marathon at tinyurl.com/tomsmarathon
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A video about the housing crisis and how landlords ruined everything.
Chapters
00:00 1. The Room
05:26 A. A Guided Tour
07:05 2. Landlord Tetris
10:41 B. The Empty Building
12:47 3. Boiling Point
15:50 C. So, I'm Running the London Marathon
16:59 4. Shelter
19:33 D. 1,000 Miles
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Select footage courtesy of Getty
#HousingCrisis #Landlords #Rent
Support Shelter's vital work protecting renters from bad landlords by sponsoring me to run the London Marathon at tinyurl.com/tomsmarathon
who are you again?
I feel like you are putting too much on the landlords here. Couldnt this also be caused by rising demand for housing in an area where the pop density has reached the maximum the building can support? A lot of areas like this prevent higher density buildings from being built. The whole NIMBYISM thing
@@kirmie44 Nobody is forced to rent out housing for more money just because there are more people applying for it. You could just choose one person and demand the same price you have demanded before.
heyy, you forgor to upload the video to nebula
@@johannageisel5390 The price is a different point. I am talking about the technicalities being used to change a rather spacious town home into a multifamily residence.
People will always parrot the "there's no such thing as a free lunch" line, and yet when you point out how it's not sustainable for landlords to get upwards of a third of a typical workers paycheck as a reward for already having more money than them... Somehow you're the one who doesn't understand economics.
As long as you understand that landlords have nothing to do with the housing crisis, acknowledging how much they benefit from it is fine.
@@abbynguyen5923 But they do have something to do with the housing crisis: Often landlords - not individuals, but the larger agencies who operate at scale - are actively involved in lobbying local governments in opposition to housing. Because more housing would mean their 'investment' loses value.
@@abbynguyen5923 "landlords buying up all the houses and pricing everyone out of the market have nothing to do with the housing crisis" - sentences uttered by people who very definitely haven't had their brains turned to cottage cheese by decades of pro-capitalist rhetoric.
No but you see, you don't understand the most fundamental part about economics. You're not supposed to question it, and you have to pretend like the economy has always and will always work in this same exact way.
What're you talking about? Keep that mathematics bullshit out of our money!
Says every economist ever.
We have utterly failed as a society when affordable housing is not obtainable for people.
Its a feature, not a bug.
@@Atamanxxxvii Here in the U.S tax money is spent on making the bureaucracy for affordable housing programs more complicated so homeless people cant access resources without waiting many years and contacting multiple kinds of lawyers. It is very much a feature.
affordable anything. 🤷🏾
@@cipher8987 I am in affordable housing in the US and basically you pay for it with your physical and mental health instead of with your wallet. To get into my house I had to live in "programs" for 4 years. Luckily I did it in my youth (I was homeless since childhood) so I came out on the other side more intact than a lot of people do. Many people who enter the program start using drugs to cope with the living conditions. I saw lots of people come in sober and drop out addicted. Since exiting I have joined a youth activist movement to help other young people who are homeless and work with government agencies to advocate for better practices and services in these programs. But I imagine it will be a life-long fight. The bureaucracy makes too much money off of people like me to let go without kicking and screaming.
Allowing homelessness to exist alongside billionares is a crime against humanity
In previous accommodation my landladies ex-husband was the one who advocated that I needed a functional kitchen. She was fully okay with me being unable to cook and store food for several months.
When I moved out she accused me of stealing the washing machine. That I owned.
Currently I'm living in a rental from a non-profit cooperation, and it's just a world of difference.
we need to make being a landlord illegal. Anyone who becomes a landlord immediately gets a trillion dollar fine, life in prison, and no chance of parole. Much better than the current system
As a small landlord whose tenant's refrigerator wasn't getting cold enough (according to her) and had to be put on the town's applicance repairman's waiting list for a couple weeks, I can't imagine what several months of incoming complaints and threats would be like to endure. That landlord must have quite a constitution! I was getting incoming volleys and rants 2-3x daily. I'm surprised she didn't send in a SWAT team or the National Guard 😵
@@c.rutherford youre a landlord? cringe
@@squeenixu just somebody that worked all my life, saved money, paid for an old building and renovated it, yes. And can't afford to keep it without renting it out to someone else.
That makes me a "landlord". Whoopie do!
You can put down your bag of Doritos, get off the couch and do it too. If you pay your bills, a bank will give you a mortgage!
#yesyoucan
@@c.rutherford nevermind kind of ok landlord because that property would have been destroyed otherwise
problem is with those who just buy new property just to exploit people, especially when in the future i actually need to have a place to live (i am currently 16) while being able to pay for food at the same time
I had a miserable experience with landlords. We used to rent out a plot of land where we would do charity work with disabled people around the community. the place we managed to get was horrible when we first got it, it was run down, there were no windows, the roof was in disrepair, and it was seriously overgrown. We had to pay out of pocket to do repairs on the whole thing and bring it up to a standard for the charity. The more we did repairs the more the landlord raised the rent, mind you he didn't pay anything for the repairs and simply raised rent each month. the more we fixed up the place the more expensive it got to stay there, and sometimes he would just raise rent "because economy" or whatever bullshit. it got so bad we couldn't afford to do our work there and had to leave. we left the landlord a place that was incredibly well built, repaired, and in great condition, all paid for by us while we had to pay rent and run a charity. what did the landlord do with the place? he turned it into a motel. landlords are literal vampires.
Sorry to hear your experience.
They're the most literal example of a rent-seeker. They extract wealth without creating anything of value themselves; they're housing scalpers
This is why the right to buy should be extended to all private property. If you've occupied a property for a say 2 years and have improved it you should first dibs on buying it, perhaps contractually agreeing a price before you put in the work to improve it. There's a thing called a purchase lease option that creative people who add value to derelict spaces should be able to use more. Even better, lease holders should by law get a share of the capital gain they have added in the time they lived there. I wish the artists that often start the move toward gentrification got the benefit instead of lazy landlords. It's a matter of education and the law and councils making it easier for those with little money to create the right structures so that it happens.
Why didn't you do what you needed to do? You know what
@@cmw3737 Why reason with them, they hardly do it for you. 10 years renting and you own it. Done no discussion. The Bank can go pound sand.
I'm thanking the heavens on knees for housing cooperatives!
I live in a 45m² flat in a minor major city in Germany, and I pay something around 380€ warm. That means including heating, (warm) water, trash collection and the cleaning of the shared hallway.
That's because there is no landlord. You buy 600€ of shares when you become a member of the cooperative and this money is being invested into acquiring more housing, or just making sure the existing properties are well cared for. Your rent goes to covering the costs of that too. If you want to move into another property of the coop, you can do that without further payments, and if you want to leave the coop altogether, you get your 600€ back (unless you trashed the place).
In theory, we could even receive dividents from the revenue, but since the rents are low and haven't risen for at last 12 years, there is no big profit.
very cool, think i saw something about that program over in Germany. didnt the government take a load of properties from out of town speculators who were buying houses and leaving them vacant for years before selling them for a massive mark up, and give them back to the city, to the people? something along those lines, if memory serves me correctly. we need something like that over here. its getting very silly isnt it :(
@@Cloudsurfer69 I think you might be referring to the initiative "Deutsche Wohnen Enteignen" (expropriate the company Deutsche Wohnen) in Berlin. That was actually a referendum in the city of Berlin... which got passed, against all the campaigns in conservative newspapers. You know, like "hurr durr, nobody will invest in this city anymore!" and "we don't have enough apartments, expropriation won't add new ones and afterwards nobody will build anything anymore!". Still, it went through, because people in Berlin were just SO. FED. UP. There's two big corporations ("Deutsche Wohnen" and "Vonovia") that together own hundreds of thousands of apartments and houses all over Germany and a lot of those are in Berlin. They do ALL the "bad-landlord-stuff". Jacking up prices for no reason. Adding fees for services that were not rendered (like a fee for clearing the way to the door of snow in a year where it didn't snow in Berlin AT ALL.) Doing bullshit "renovations" against the tenants wishes for months on end to get people to leave so they can put the apartment up for a higher rent. And so on and so forth.
Technically, the city council and the mayor have to go through with the expropriation now... Something which is allowed by the german constitution, by the way. The state is allowed to expropriate corporations and private owners of land and/or means of production if that is necessary for the common good and if the previous owners are compensated adequately. (It just has never been done since the constitution was written, but it IS in there.) And the current (social democrat) mayor ran on a platform of making the whole thing happen...
Exceeept... Not that she's in office, suddenly she doesn't want to EXPROPRIATE the corporations anymore, she wants to incentivise them. And when that sparked outrage, she put together a commission on how to do the expropriation stuff. The commission was full of people who are very pro-open-market, pro-business, pro-property-rights, etc... Which was the next scandal... There is a lot of wringing-of-hands and dragging-of-feet going on, right now. No conclusion in sight.
I grew up in a similar co-op in Vancouver, laws changed, now they're not long for this city
I lived in one of those for a year in germany as well. It's the best system for renting in my opinion, the best experience I've ever had renting an apartment
This is how it should be done. It can even be applied for retail/work spaces. It has the added advantage of making moving so much easier.
I am disabled and live on disability pension. I was crushed to find out that disability housing takes half of your pension of $900 so I have $450 to make last a fortnight.
The house doesn’t even have differences that benefit me as someone with level 2 autism and it’s just that they give disabled people the opportunity to live somewhere in a housing drought at the expense of half of their income.
It gets worse. I cannot work because then they will cut my pension if I earn more than $170 per fortnight and it ends up meaning I have less money overall. I want to work and get the skills that come with that but we are literally worse off for it.
Society punishes you for being disabled leaving you to suffer in a poverty trap. Being disabled is expensive too
Also disabled pensioner. And I'm on the NDIS (Australian Disability program) and thought that maybe the disability specific housing (which I am severely disabled enough to be eligible for) might be a possibility. Nope.
Firstly, they take 80% of your pension (it's the same as with aged care homes). But also, all the SDA places are privately owned. And they know that it is far more profitable to shove as many disabled people into one house as possible. So, there is no such thing as a house available for a disabled person and their family (my situation). If I want to live in a home that is designed to meet my disability needs, I would have to leave my brother (my full-time informal carer) and my minor child (for whom I am their only parent) and go live in a group home. And pay 80% of my pension for the privilege. It's completely borked. But private rental isn't better. So my only hope is to put myself on the years long social housing list and hope they take us. At least government housing will make some changes to make things more disability friendly. In the meantime, I have to live in unsafe housing.
Yeah i have a disability pension too and im constantly worried about losing it i only get 850 which is hardly enough. A church owns my house and i dont think the carpet or the heaters hace been changed in decades
You have to choose. Creating hybrid plans where disabled people get pensions are also able to make a living sound pointless to me.
do youget 900 usd biweekly or is that some other currency
@@ss_avsmt the amount I earn is not a living either way. Disabled people get hired and in put in higher positions less and get paid less than non-disabled folks
When I was renting I had multiple landlords steal from me, even though I did free work to fix leaks, mold, and even rescued a cat from inside a railing system. I started billing my labour properly in the last house.
Adam smith himself thought landlords were just parasites
Thats Smith’s stopped clock moment.
People who can’t afford to buy houses And renting still are just as parasitic. Landlords that are big corporations are bad, but there are some landlords here trying to keep rent low and helping the tenants get by barely making enough to cover mortgage and house depreciation
@@daotran2300 wrong
@@daotran2300 Those landlords could do even more by selling their excess homes to families and not charge any rent.
I'm not going to have any sympathy for anyone who overcharges for homes. And anything more than 0 is overcharging.
@@ahouyearno Housing should be a right not a commodity!
I read somewhere that Landlords provide housing in much the same way as a ticket reseller is responsible for event tickets
Yes, they're scalpers, the service they provide is rent-seeking, which isn't a service, it's parasitism.
Second Thought used that analogy in their recent video on Landlords.
@@nightfall3605 I thought I heard it before JT's vid but I'm glad someone recognized it. Thanks
@@evangrey4737 construction workers get paid to build the building. If nobody paid them, they wouldn’t build it. It all starts with the guy with money. It’s not like construction workers build buildings for fun
@@philmccracken179 congrats on getting half way through articulating the problem, that must have been very tough for you.
My older sister has started doing Airbnb, which is somehow worse than being a regular landlord. It's hard to hide my contempt in this day and age where it's impossible to be oblivious to the insidious nature of landlords.
Why hide it? Remind her what she is.
You should praise who deserve praise, and also criticize who deserve criticize. Maybe because of your harsh words they may have to think twice.
One person having one or two airbnbs is not really the issue, the problem is much greater than that and getting mad at her will accomplish nothing other than souring your relationship with her
@@danielyeary148 the power of large numbers is the problem. One person owning 1-2 properties is exponential. 1 million owners renting out two is 2 millions spaces hoarded out for a overpriced space. So if 5-10 million people do what you are saying, you could have over 20 million air BNB or Vrbo or whatever and create the same problems were dealing with
@@kaptivatingstudios676 Yes. But you could pay a mortage instead of rent, and become landowner yourself. Also keep in mind, that's the situation in the cities. In my country the prices of city apartments are through the roof. But just one hour drive out from city, there are near abandoned villages and towns where real estate cost next to nothing in comparison.
If I would decide to move into city center, I would need to trade my 5 bedroom 2 story house with large garden for a cramped 1 room apartment with moldy walls and broken instalations. That's how it is.
Also - the time for buying real estate is realy bad right now. Wait a few years would be my advice.
the creeping realisation of what The Room truly was and how it came to be was genuinely a little terrifying.
“The housing crisis is simply the logical outcome of our economy working as intended” bro EXACTLY. Why uphold a system that Directly and Intentionally causes all of these problems
Money.
@@user-xsn5ozskwg money is literally the economy brother. I'm debating the free market here.
Why uphold a system that benefits the wealthy few at the expense of the many?
Because we were indoctrinated to think that any alternatives to capitalism either don't work or are outright evil.
@@ramonacalvin9100 I feel you, but the reason why people uphold that system is money.
@@ramonacalvin9100 economies can and have existed without money. We're nowhere close to overcoming the money hurdle but it's something to keep in mind.
Landlords are a massive burden on any economy given most of them are either massive companies with shady deals or private owners who prefer living off the property income without actually producing any "new" money to put it back into circulation.
Edit: some people have taken my comment as an attack on landlords - and getting quite defensive for no reason - but I'm merely stating how "idle" properties are bad for economy.
Rent for living quarters comes from the tenants' pockets, reducing their spending power which in turn slows down currency circulation.
However, rent for commercial spaces comes from the profits for the tenant business or a company. These profits are accounted for after all the employee salaries and business expenses are already met. Which doesn't hit the currency flow as hard.
If I wanted to bad mouth landlords I'd say so quite literally because I've had more than a fair share of bad experience with them. Though looking at the problem from systemic perspective is more helpful than a personal one.
@@toniderdon yeah most of the regulations protecting us were removed in the 1980s idiot
Like I know I am being rude, but you are straight up lying and probably have a mother or father or sibling who has multiple houses. Only possible reason as to why you side with land lords.
@@toniderdon The legislation IS there, worldwide, this is by design.
@@toniderdon Found the bloodsucking landlord
I’ve never read so much nonsense in one post for at least a decade.
What I really love about your videos is how unapologetic they are. You're not here to have a pleasant discussion and conversation on the merits and demerits, you're here to lay down the facts. No retreading old ground; just the points.
Yet despite this, there's no vitriol, no personal attacks or dunks, everything is just stated factually in a way that can't really be refuted.
Not "unapologetic"- just militant and unwilling to look at both sides of the argument. A person largely governed by their own emotions.
@@lochnessmunster1189 he clearly does look at both sides, it's just that sometimes one side is just wrong. I won't entertain the side that refuses to acknowledge climate change, for one.
Objectivity and neutrality are not a compromise between two extremes of opinions. When the news broadcast pro-brexit voices that were constantly lying, they were neither objective nor neutral.
I have no clue how you could have honestly watched his content and come to the conclusion that he is governed by emotions. He's not Ben Shapiro.
@@deckie_ He is governed by emotions. Have a look at the title of the video: "how landlords ruined everything". Everything? Music, movies, video games, cycling, restaurants, air travel, literature? All "ruined"?
As for Brexit, both sides lied. Boris lied when he said the money saved would go the the NHS, and remainers lied when they said that a structure such as the EU is essential for free trade in Europe.
Mexico City is currently on the verge of a different kind of housing crisis. Because of all the “global northerners” who’ve decided to come pay ridiculous rent prices, the local population is being priced out of living in our home town
That's every capital city in a country that borders another who's swallowed the neoliberal Kool Aid. Welcome to the future.
Wow, given the city's size that is unreal. I had no idea it was that bad over there, so used to gentrification in the States. I moved to Phoenix just before the housing madness started and out of state parasites started to buy up every structure in the city and when they ran out of that, started buying the land on mobile home parks and kicking everyone out. It's the worst in the entire country. I can't get out soon enough.
Kinda the same is hapenning in Mérida, and in the north also happens but not the entire city or state, just some colonias close to factories
Leave it to 'murica to make the whole world a shittier place, just look at EU right now, albeit that one was seconded by EU's own corrupt politicians, not unlike anywhere else.
What you describe is well known in America, look up the term Carpet-Bagger.
Traditionally what British builders do, is..... Build to standards FAR below government regulations, sell all the flags, run themselves bankrupt. And start up another building company under a different name the following month. Thereby escaping all the repercussions and responsibility.
This was a huge issue a couple of years ago when the government came and inspected a whole bunch of homes. Uncovering a long list of required imporovements to make the property comply with the law. Most families cannot afford to be slapped with a 20-30-50 grand bill just like that.
As an Architect in Russia I can tell you its same everywhere... With a two minor differences - 1) here they sell flats when they even didnt started to dig a foundation pit. 2) Government dont piss a shit about how bad is your already built house until some company wants to demolish it and build an another one.
It really should be the case that homes are inspected by a government agent before the homes are deemed livable. If they aren't up to spec the builders must make it so.
I'd also be in favour of licensing for building and other trades. That way if you're deemed to be negligent or incompetent you can be barred from working again.
@@Andrey_Gysev
Yeees.... I have been to Russia. Back when the streets were full of Lada and Volga, and until the streets were full of BMW and Mercedes. So I have seen that big change.
I think its safe to say Europe try their best to put the bar a little higher than Russia and be more civilized in every possible way.
@@trevvonhiggle1980
Well.... According to the law, you cant simply shut down and start something else the next month. But they do. Just put the whole business in somebody elses name.
And then they keep the business that sells and rents out the apartments as a separate business. So they can "go bankrupt" in the building part, but not the sales and managing part.
@@trevvonhiggle1980 This is already the case.
I was involved in organising the Plymouth rent strikes, some of the shit we saw was absolutely shocking... Not only have people lowered their expectations, landlords and agencies keep shifting the goalposts of what is considered acceptable - a lot of complaints (some quite serious ones like flooding and broken toilets) were just laughed off as "that's what renting is like"...
Rent striking was a good way to secure some immediate wins and some minor changes to the way student accommodation is run in the city but I think 2 years later a lot of the stuff we did is being swept under the carpet or forgotten about completely. We need a tenants union in the city
Here in the US, in any given year, there are 3.5 million homeless, 1.4 million being children. There are also 16 million vacant, unused homes here, even as there is a massive building of even more homes.
Similar to how we produce more than enough food to feed the entire world population, yet millions still die of starvation.
Capitalism working as intended.
@@GTAVictor9128 Exactly. In capitalism, sixty percent of food is wasted even as millions starve. Capitalist countries like the US export fuel even as they simultaneously import it, not to mention the fuel it takes to ship it back and forth. Of course we also must have middleman jacking up prices in virtually every aspect of society... Then cappies tell us socialism is wasteful.
@@GTAVictor9128 Restaurants and stores are forced by law to throw away food rather than giving it for free. It's a dog eat dog world and the government is not on your side.
I'm studying architecture and it's pretty depressing how little power we actually have to address the housing crisis
Molotovs are cheap and easy, and with a bit of searching addresses aren't too hard to find.
Stop worrying and learn to love suburban sprawl.
Same, We design homes but cant afford them. MAKE IT MAKE SENSE. Even if we design something cheap to build, it will just be put on the market by the owner for market rates.
@@lindmorn5909 that's my point. Architects can design as many sustainably conscious homes and housing schemes using retrofit, but unless the government/council/people with the money approve of them, these designs will just remain conceptual. The power is at the top. The housing crisis is financially benefitting landlords and corporations so why would they change?
@@bellatam_ exactly!
I have been homeless since the tail end of august due to price hikes and overly-rigorous qualification processes. I’ve always prided myself on being able to ‘figure it out.’ This year confirmed, to me at least, that this is getting so much more out of control than I realized. Good luck out there everyone
The system working exactly as intended is perfectly accurate. It is no coincidence that the fee you pay for a space to live and the economic term for extracting revenue from nonproductive assets are both rent.
Rent and inheritance are both drags (dead weight) on any economy.
Inheritance?
@@jade4781 Inheritance as in being handed down a fortune, business, estate, etc. for free just because of birthright. Like, the big stuff that enables modern-day dynasties to persist. Not small stuff like a family home or an heirloom or whatever
Have you ever considered actually trying to be a landlord?
@@truth.speaker that requires you to be able to afford property in the first place.
@@truth.speaker my brother in Christ I spend 10000 dollars a year on an apartment you have no idea what you're talking about. I still have good savings making 25 dollars an hour, but I'm kinda the exception since I'm in a skilled trade. Not everyone can do this, and I'm in one of the cheapest places to live in the US. I'd still have to save for 3 years to afford a basic 300k house.
I've been a landlord and decided it was barely worth it. Better for people who are more money obsessed, which explains a lot. Residential landlords are mostly self selected cheapskates or older people who bought up houses when things were affordable.
Or buy-to-letters who want to do the bare minimum they possibly can legally get away with while relying on other people to buy their own equity in the property for them.
Either it's an asset you're gradually acquiring equity in, or it's a passive income stream on something you actually own. Landlords who try to make it both at once while squeezing the life out of the property & anyone in it are a blight.
My landlord is a colleague in his 40s, who bought this flat to live in when he was in his 20s, and started renting it when he got married and moved in with his wife. He's as good a landlord as anyone could hope for.
@@RoamingAdhocrat He's also rarer than hen's teeth (assuming that your assessment is even marginally correct)
@@davidmiller9485 I'm almost certain he is a colleague - I see a green dot next to his name in MS Teams from time to time
@@RoamingAdhocrat haha nice
Having spent 8 years in the UK... As a poor uni student AND as a highly paid professional, I got to say.... British housing standards are terrible across the board. I lived last in the ultra posh villages down the Thames and even there, same thing. Mold and rot underneath every carpet. Money saved and skimpered on materials everywhere. The washing machine rattles the entire house to its very core. Brittle surfaces rather than proper materials. Its a complete nightmare.
British housing is on par with things you see in ex Soviet countries. --Or America... Terrible houses there too. But at least they tend to have a nicer weather so you dont really need insulation or weather proofing. Britain does, but doesnt have it. Its completely normal to wear a jacket INDOORS in the UK. The building itself, offering zero protection against the elements.
I used to say Britain build houses the way Americans build cars. It looks like the real thing from a distance. But the closer you get, you realise they arent.
My god, you need to get yourself a decent landlord. You should have come to me.
@@alexdavis1541 decent & landlord don't go together. you're intrinsically taking advantage of people. get a real job.
@@MossTunic I've got one of those as well.
@Luci Evelyn If you say so. If so, I have been indecent for thirty years. I have at least been able to observe the nature of the market change over that time.
Here's the first point though, with housing; rented, owned, social housing or not, there is one law that cannot be ignored.
So, although we have a housing market that is truly distorted for other reasons, no-one can ignore or change in any way the law of supply and demand.
To correct the housing problem this has to be addressed. What you hear a lot about is correcting supply. In other words, building more.
That's only half of it. Demand is through the roof. There are various drivers but by far the greatest driver is mass immigration. That fact is also the reason demand side is rarely mentioned.
The distortions outside of supply and demands are also interesting. By far the biggest problem is the value of housing as an asset. Putting even a deposit out of reach of many.
Why is housing more expensive than it should be even under the impositions of supply and demand? Quantitative easing. In other words, flooding the economy with money that does not exist. It is in the nature of economics that this will drift into propping up the value of assets. Why do we have QE to the degree we have? Because we have a government that thought it could send everyone home from work for months on end and still be paid.
The current state of the housing market is all those pigeons coming home to roost
hahaha you said better weather in america. that is grand. there is only a couple places in america where the weather is tolerable. and guess what? living there costs 20 times more than everywhere else lol. 1 million dollars for a tiny shoebox one bedroom house and those kinds of things in those areas. but you cant really criticize USA independently since its EXTREMELY controlled by europeans in every possible way. anything bad that happens here is the direct result of someone in europe paying for/ordering it to happen as so.
In this episode Tom prepares to outrun the housing crisis.
Radical idea: No one should make any profit from buying and selling houses. Houses should be treated just like any other property. Like selling a used car, which will always be at a lower price than its initial price
I would like for the house value to keep up with inflation. Ideally so would wages.
That sounds like a good idea on the face of it, but would require the constant building of new houses to maintain itself. Cars depreciate over time automatically because new, better cars are constantly being built and bought, and because many cars aren't as efficient or functional after a few years have gone by. Houses, on the other hand, are not being constantly replaced or rebuilt, and are generally considered things that should last a long time. So having a market where the value of a house constantly depreciates would eventually lead to almost all houses being worthless. One could argue that would be better and that housing should be free (which I agree with), but that should come from a different model than depreciative housing price, as under this model people still need the money they get from selling a house in order to afford the new property.
The main issue with house pricing is the fluctuation and lack of correlation with average wage/inflation rates. Minor, tiny changes in the neighbourhood or town or country as a whole can drastically change the price, regardless of whether that's affordable on average wages. For example, London houses are not expensive because Londoners on average earn enough to be able to afford million-pound price tags, they're expensive because London is a desirable location for a lot of business/tech jobs. Changing the price model to depend more on average local earnings wouldn't entirely stop London being more expensive, but it would still significantly lower the insane prices. Add to that a ban (or at least many MANY more restrictions and rules) on landlords and their rent prices, it'd hugely affect how many people can afford housing long-term.
you dont know basic
economics
With that logic nothing should go up on price, including wages. But that shortly makes one of the least valuable countries on the planet.
My biggest worry surrounding this issue is how scary quickly we're barreling towards the point where you couldn't buy a house even if you wanted to. As we all know, it becomes easier and easier to make money as the amount of money (or rather, capital) you have continues to grow. This applies to homes too. Giant companies are buying up ALL the houses and apartments they can and either selling them, turning them into apartments, flipping them, or JUST SITTING ON THEM FOR YEARS AT A TIME WITH NOBODY IN THEM (because it's worth it financially to do so. That's how ya know things are broken). This isn't going to magically start getting better, it's going to get worse faster and faster. This is the kind of issue that *NEEDS* regulation. "The Invisible Hand of the Market" is not going to fix this one. The Hand _created_ this problem, it cannot also solve it.
(And to be entirely straightforward, the dystopia where *everyone* is forced to rent from them and has no other options is a landlords wet dream.. make no mistake on that one)
Care to explain how the "hand" "created" the problem? Sounds like the problem is lack of regulation, lack of tax incentives for renters (we will ignore that you don't pay property tax)
The irony in this comment is astounding because you identify the problem; and then move the goalpost far beyond where it needs to be. All while literally engaging in fearmongering and ad hominem attacks against landlords. There are landlords who are soulless greedy moneygrubbers. There are also landlords who give fair pricing and provide cheap, non permanent housing for people that need that.
note: I don't own any property, residential or commercial.
I currently rent.
If I tried to buy a house with the same square footage, I would see a large jump in my yearly budget expenses because of my mortgage, and property taxes.
The problem is the government and it's lack of effective regulation, not some "hand" (a *poor* metaphor to try to explain the nuances of the market to people who didn't go to school for one of the many branches of the studies of economics)
@@akaku9 Bruh look up what "the invisible hand" means. It literally means the way an unregulated market behaves. You and the OP are in agreement and you don't even realise because you couldn't do a 5 second google search.
What AbstractSpaces said. Dylan's comment made me lol because it's in total agreement with Tighe.
@@abstractspaces8186 I knew that the average reading level in america was falling; but I didn't know it was this low.
If you think I'm agreeing with OP you probably were the slow reader in class.
You guys telling me to look up "what the unseen hand is" is making my fucking head spin lmfao
@@akaku9 >The problem is the government and it's lack of effective regulation, not some "hand"
You are a simpleton. Not a dig, just stating facts.
The hand is directly related to the government and its lack of regulation. Look up neoliberalism, aka the most laissez faire form of governance we still tout in the current age. THAT is the hand. THAT is the problem. This hand needs to be guillotined.
Recently, my cousin had a studio when the only window was in the door itself.
Technically, it counts.
My old university landlord told myself and my housemates that a plumber would refuse to come out and fix the leak under the sink because the job was "too small" so he tried to fix it himself , I tried to call him out on his BS because I knew it would have been a job a professional would have jumped at, but was told to keep quiet.
Landlords are parasites of society
Council landlords, private landlords, social landlords, or all three, ?
It's an exception when they're not parasitic tbh
They are a sub-set of a group.... the whole lot are entirely parasitic though.
The investor class tell Society that no one would be able to start a company, or construct a house in this case, without them. In exchange, they demand the ability to take funds out of the economy in perpetuity. In doing so, they have created the situation where people lack the ability to even begin attempting to dismantle the system.
Not legally anyway...
Strange how the laws are written to favour these parasites, no?
For that is another element to keep in mind about this class, they have regulated and outlawed things into their favour. In the past, a house wasn't consider something you invested in... it was a temporary dwelling that you tore down and rebuilt every few decades as your family situation changed. Now though, you just try to add an additional story to your house so you can move in your extended family because the Housing Crisis has put them onto the streets....
@@chriswatkin5476 all three.. they are just like a bank giving a mortgage but at the end they keep the house.
That’s like saying all the people taking government benefits are parasites.
My roommate(and landlord) yelled at me a bit ago for making a pb&j at 1am. Now they're complaining that I'm taking up too much space, yet I literally stopped using the kitchen after she pitched a fit. My other roommate(another landlord) said that she never really wanted a roommate in the first place... Instead of acknowledging that she's fucking manic and unreasonable AF. Can't wait for them to get another roommate worse off than me. Kinda like the last one they had who's dog bit them three times.....
"Dogs sense bad people" lmao
Clearly, that dog did nothing wrong
That dog was a good boy.
I have some distant realatives as roomies and i love to cook but i try to steer clear whenever they are out and about. They dont share food unless i pay for whatever i use of theirs and i have disability they get paid evey week i have to wait a month and my check barely lasts two weeks before its gone
My landlady illegally evicted me because my cat was making too much noise. The cat whose only toy was a scratching post.
What if we put a ban on owning more than one primary residential property? Or put a cap on how many you can own, like maximum of 2, 3, 4, or 5?
Unlikely given how many MPs are landlords and that’s in all the major parties.
this is what ive been thinking for literal years. why would anyone ever need 2+ houses besides making passive income off of other peoples need for shelter? the only case i would make an exemption for are people with more than 1 kid so that they can buy their kids a roof in advance before they grow up IF their initial home isnt bigger than like 500 square meters.
That's when they start doing creative possession like they already do accounting where now, on paper, every member of their immediate & extended family "owns" the max allowance for residential properties.
This would really not do very much. The issue is not with the number of properties owned. A property management company can own a block of 100 apartments and take good care of them, or some landlord can own 1 and be awful.
@@n00dl3 Currently the way we do taxes is we tax people more for more valuable property. Property taxes should be regressive, this way increasing the value of your property is rewarded rather than punished.
I went to college in Toronto and once rented a room that was a converted garage. The only window was the actual garage door slit windows. Housing here is absolutely bonkers and landlords are typically pretty scummy
Landlords are just scaupers
Ive been living in downtown TO for the past year. My room is basically a square with a door and one itty bitty window waaay up high with a wonderful view into the hallway… i pay $750/month for this and have to share it with 6 other strangers, have to share bathrooms and the tiny kitchen thats so small its barely usable for one person nevermind 7. Also my rent is the lowest in the whole building.W
I'm homeless rn and looking at facing this harsh winter outside. The amount of tenacity and energy you need to keep harassing the council or any bodies that might help you is immense, and I've been thinking; imagine having to deal with this situation with depression on top of that which plenty of people in my situation do. I can definitely see how so many people fall through the cracks.
I'm a homeless advocate here in San Francisco, CA (living on a low income), and the situation is quite ugly in my country, too. I just want to say (from across the pond): may good fortune come your way, very soon.
@@brindlekintales thank you!
Homeless with internet connection?!?
@@philmccracken179 ever hear of mobile data? Public WiFi? Homie.... It is 2022
@@em97c oh lol my bad
This is one of those videos that makes me so frustrated at life that I have to split up the viewing in parts to maintain my sanity
We need to end Capitalism for housing and many other things for a better future for all, but the only way is revolution
I once lived in a house converted to apartments, where one of the second-floor apartments had a tiny square bathroom, with a door that opened to the balcony. The door had a window in it. The toilet was directly opposite the window. There were no window coverings.
The loo with the view!
In studio he seems knowledgable and entertaining.
Outside, amongst British nature, Tom seems like a Tolkien character I cannot help but be delighted by, however I cannot pay attention to a word he is saying.
hi Tom, merry Tom, ring a ding dillo
We cleaned our last apartment so well it was, as admitted by the renting agent, as in better condition than when we got it.
Still charged us 45 quid for dusting. They'll try anything
been struggling with homelessness for the past 5 years or so and the thing that always messes up my place for whatever reason is the landlords. its such a struggle over in the UK at the moment (as we all know lol) and i am currently out of work due to health issues so its real hard getting back on your feet once your out on the streets. im luckily in a house atm, but, the buikding is about to be shut down due to building regulations so have no idea what im gonna do. im broke, but not yet broken. ill keep on fighting, but damn it feels pointless when you have a government that actively hate poor and sick people. this winter is gonna be... fun
I'm so sorry you have to deal with that 💔 Best of luck to you
Just checking in, how are you doing?
There was a period last year where myself and my family were essentially evicted because the state of the house we were renting was so reprehensible that the council just straight up said we could not live there. We had tried to get basic repairs done for the 8 or so years we'd lived there, but every single time we were ignored, and it turned out when some electrician came to assess the safety according to new legislation that the electrics were out of date even for some 20 or so years ago. Landlords exploit basic needs for extortionate amounts and i'm both unsurprised that it's amounted to this and shocked every time that it culminates how it does for tenants.
A friend of mine is just moving out of a house that sounds like it's in a similar state. It's a Victorian house with roof tiles missing, ceilings caved in, walls with all the plaster falling off, stairs treads soft and about to cave in, dodgy electrics that have been condemned at one point (only thing that was just about sorted out) and it's generally never had basic maintenance probably since the 90s. Environmental health said they could step in but she'd likely have to leave immediately since the condition was so poor. They ended up deciding to leave it so she had time to find somewhere to move to which has taken over a year.
This makes me see my previous landlady in a complete new light. I always thought she was super nice because she was talkative and didn't mind people smoking inside the house but... Man, all the things I ignored! The windows weren't well placed, so the glass would bang endlessly whenever the weather was windy - aside from the windows not locking. There was an infiltration in the living room ceiling and whenever there was heavy raining (which was every day in the summer), the walls would get wet and water fell from the lamp holes. There were holes in the bedroom wall. I lived there for 3 years and none of the problems were fixed at this period. Althought I knew it was her job to fix it, I was afraid she'd charge me for the fixes in the rent so, as a poor college student, I just lived with buckets and towels in the middle of the living room, terrifying banging at the windows in the middle of the night and constant fear of someone invading the house for 3 years. Oh, and she would blast folk music on her giant amplifier from 8am to 3am on the weekends. I don't miss her.
Getting your deposit back is always a battle in the UK. The CULTURE is that landlords (Gawd how I hate that expression... Landlord) Their culture is that the deposit is THEIR money and they should try and keep as much of it as possible. There are strict laws and regulations for that in other countries. They cant simply keep it like they do in the UK.
The correct term is landleech.
Yeah I am a student in the UK right now trying to get my deposit back 😭. I actually left it in a better condition than when I moved it, the kitchen and bathroom were filthy. So many people have no idea how cruel and petty landlords can be before they experience being a tenant a few times.
@@aftokratory
Yeah in other countries this is dealt with by a third party and not the "landlord" himself. Over in the UK they are often just difficult by default and they keep at it until you have no choice but to go the legal route, and then you are left wondering... Is it worth the hassle or not. And they are betting on that you will think its not. Its terrible.
Also many will ask for a ridiculous deposit. And want to be paid a WEEK. Its truly a rotten culture, the whole thing. Thats one of the things Im glad I never have to go through again.
Are there ever any consequences to the landlord if the decision to withhold your deposit is overturned by the TDS, or whoever? Is there anything to stop them trying it on?
I love the term landlord. It makes them sound like the medieval relic that they are, and suggests what should be done about them (it's guillotine time !!).
Also, the old Thatcherite rule banning councils from borrowing money, means most of them to have land they can't build on and housing they can't improve. So they go through crazy backflips trying to persuade housing developers to build/develop in exchange for some social/affordable units. knowing that much of the properties will be at exorbitant private rents, sublet into smaller units or even worst of all land banked.
In 7 years of renting I've seen flats with no central heating, scamming landlords, stairways leading to nowhere, vents connecting the bedroom to my neighbour's, the list goes on. And the cost of these places is higher than ever
I've experienced (and am currently experiencing) landlords in both the UK and US. And they all suck. In a way that makes me want to build guillotines...
I had one landlord who kept my deposit because of dust behind the radiator (the ONLY thing wrong with that place).
I had one, who not only kept my deposit. Then charged me an extra $600 to pay for replacing the carpets after I left. And sent that extra bill straight to a collections agency.
That same landlord ignored the black mold coming through the walls, basically telling me that I was imagining it. And also when we reported problems with our pipes, they again ignored then and implied I was an idiot. Particularly the large bulge in the wall (caused by the leaking pipe) which they tried to claim had always been there (it had not) and was nothing to worry about. And then the hot water pipe burst and the guys who came to repair them (and outside contractor) found that every single pipe in the apartment was about to fail, or had failed.
And that's on top of massive price hikes because "its the market innit".
The current landlord, I've not been here long enough to determine. There are lots of little things though in the house that they probably should have fixed before i moved it, but I'm doing myself as it's just easier than fighting with them over it.
When do we eat the landlord class?
It's always useful to know where your landleech sleeps.
I feel this in my soul, we're getting the "fun" of living in a complex as it gets gentrified in real time. What's wild is, they've put in massive amounts of work to make it look better, but no actual quality of life improvements. We've got a gate and new paint and LED lights and a cop that patrols, but the doors still hang so badly off the hinges there's a gap, single pane windows, no insulation, gas stove/oven in every house but no ventilation anywhere near it, the playground is a run down mosquito nest, but thank god we've got a gate now so people have to wait in line an hour to drive in. I'm legitimately glad to be able to walk to everything I need (even if there isn't an actual sidewalk path out of the complex).
They've nearly doubled the rent but I can't for the life of me figure out what it's going to, the parking lot literally fell through the ground, I peaked in and there's just a big hole, the whole thing's hovering like a lazy minecraft structure. And somehow this is all just... normal? Why is there no legal recourse here to get any of this fixed or changed? Housing has been so mismanaged that it's legitimately cheaper these days to build a new house than fix up the old ones in a lot of places.
I have lived in Ireland all my life, one of the worst properties i have ever saw was this morning. To rent, a large room (just the room) in dublin for €800 a month, and you were only allowed use the room between Tuesday and Thursday every week
That HAS to be some kind of joke, come on, in Spain minimum salaries are €700 pcm.
Am from the Uk and i want to move to Germany it's insane a house sized apartment is like 400 euro in any larger city and wages are better to so it feels even cheaper.
@@tiloosomega2448 then move dude, even though we are out of the EU it is still relatively easy, and better than staying here and suffering ever higher prices fue everything.
@@andreaslind6338 Tanks for the engorgement
I once lived in a basement boiler room that had been converted into an apartment by building a wall around the boiler. I had a light switch that turned on both my neighbor's light at the top of their stairs, and my own hall light. They could do the same from their apartment.
Worcester University is currently building new student accommodation. It’s bracketed by The Hive (a public library & university library combined), Crowngate and the bridge linking those two large buildings. It’s unbelievable just how enclosed the new building is going to be by the existing buildings. Sunlight is going to be nonexistent for most of the flats and people are going to be walking pass first and second floor flats across the bridge plus the Hive has large windows on the side opposite the accommodation.
Soviet Russia sulked but at least they gave some space for some commi blocks
This might be an unpopular opinion, but that actually sounds okay. High density is good and often that comes with having to be in close proximity to other people. Traditional old cities all over the world have windows looking directly into other windows, and they get by just fine.
@@LightbulbTedbear2 Am aware low density is bad economically and environmentally, that's why i love cities like cities like Amsterdam with medium density but after living in a place surrounded by 30 story buildings i can say i prefere medium density over high it also was less overveiling to to trams and sidewalks.
hell ya. love seeing bigger creators expose how awful landlords (& the system that supports them) are!
omg, your video about landlord tiktok helped me realize that I'd been duped into a 'house hacking' situation. Was paying this person's whole mortgage for one room. Thankfully the housing crisis in our area let up for a little and I'm out of there now, still cringe at that video. keep it up! ❤️
@@amyporter4335 omg thats amazing haha glad i could help ;)
Second Thought put out a video on landlords very recently.
Mao Ze Kelgore W
hey kelgoreeeeeeeeeeeee
It's shrinkflation, or I like to think of it as gentriflation, things getting more expensive while pretending to be getting swanky - but actually getting shoddy. Like how a movie used to be £3 and is now who knows how much, but the building is a bit bigger. It all comes from confusing making money with making something.
The building I live in, in the center of Newcastle is an old victorian converted building. Sure it looks pretty from the outside but problems began to rear themselves pretty quickly after moving in. Heating and plumbing issues were very common last winter. Went without heating for weeks over last Christmas. I had to wash myself with water heated in a kettle because we had no hot water. 😩 the windows are awful. Very cheap and old single pane windows that actually leaked, the very first time it rained after I moved in. Utterly a trainwreck and a textbook case of landlords, property developers and management companies ruining everything to make more money. I am incredibly fortunate and happy to say I'm moving out of there and into my own home soon!
Exactly my situation!! Except I’m a student, oh man I can’t wait to see how the landlord will try whittle my deposit away especially after this year’s heating costs.
Saying a landlord earns rent money is like saying a leech earns the blood it sucks from its host.
Landlords provide housing in the same way that scalpers provide products.
@@GTAVictor9128 Yep. How could we ever live without them? Only a capitalist can consider a homeless person to be a mooch on society, but a landlord as being beneficial to it.
Hey, that's so unfair.
Leeches have been proven useful to society at times before modern medicine.\
At least leeches have _some_ level of usefulness in the grand scheme of things (they can secrete blood thinners, which can be useful for those more prone to clots). Landlords don't even have that.
@@sonicboy678 😆I stand corrected.
Thank you for standing up to the crisis and trying to help out. I fear the worst for the good people in the UK this winter.
There is a quick and easy solution, has been successfully tried in many countries around the world:
Prefab housing units, over a dozen stories high.
Sure, if you do it on the cheap these buildings won't look the greatest but they house hundreds....
My favourite is what I call Mixed Vertical Residential, because it has a splash of Commercial and Agricultural thrown in. As part of the structure is incorporating a lot of hydroponic growing techniques, they have a habit of looking far better the the 'gray brick' style of the Soviet Union. With the bottom floor dedicated to foot-traffic based commercial, like grocery stores, people don't even need to travel much to cover the basic supplies. Just remember to have that green house on the roof, supplying the locals with home grown vegetables and the likes.
The only issue I see with that is that there history be someone employed to maintain whatever plants are intended to be grown, and that feels like the first place cost cutting measures will be applied by managers leaving those spaces fairly likely to become first empty and unutilized, then eventually remodeled into more profitable spaces. I say from experience farming is a tight margin business, and I expect (assume) the margins would be better on keeping more tennants.
I recently moved into a 2-bed-1-bath apartment, planning to use the second room as an office. I was moving into a college (uni) town right before the school year started, so actually finding a place was a nightmare, and I felt a little guilty at the idea of taking an extra bedroom I didn't "need". I felt a lot less guilty when I got to tour the place and discovered that the second bedroom was only a "bedroom" in the sense that you could technically fit a bed into it if you assembled it in situ. And they're still charging full price for the second room! Ridiculous the kinds of crap landlords will try to get away with because they know most people can't afford the time or money to push for what they deserve.
I'm an Architect in Russia, i can proove that this is an International problem. For example, here in Moskow they buy student's hostels and they remake every room into an idividual flat. I mean, its 10 square meters flat with a toilet in ~1.5 square meters "room" and a single window, and they sell it for 3-4 millions rubles! Cost of a good ~60 square meters flat in a province. They name those "roomflats" as "support for a young family". I wonder how many couples divorced after living in a one "wardrobe" every day for a year...
I'm looking at buying a house. It's gonna be around $300,000. Not much compared to lots of places I know. What irks me to no end is how I'll end up giving the bank over $600,000. Almost a million dollars for a house, with most of that lining the pockets of the already wealthy.
Meanwhile people and corporations that have money can just walk up and outbid me by $50,000 in cash, still pay less than I would overall by a ton, and turn around and rent the place to someone for more than my mortgage payments would be.
How to fix? Easy: ban any entity from owning more than 4 residential properties. Get the gov't to completely fund first homes up to a set amount. Build tons of low cost, high efficiency housing.
Course there's little honest profit in any of that so it won't happen till we get out the pitchforks or dinner forks.
Thank you for this. It's so much easier to just say 'landlords bad' .. but to really look at the situation and see it for what it is, a systemic design, is the first step to fixing it.
Although this hasn't been getting a ton of views so far I immensely appreciate you covering this subject. I've recently become homeless and the barrier to passing rental applications are keeping me in this situation.
the title of the video is completely wrong. Landlords haven't 'ruined everything'.
@@lochnessmunster1189 You're right, you're right. They only ruined the common ownership of land -- and all the consequences which that has entailed.
@@TheMightyShell No, there never can be 'common ownership' of land. How would you ever own a house?
@@lochnessmunster1189 "never" -- Ever hear of "the commons"?
Also, personal property != private property
@@TheMightyShell I have indeed heard of "the commons". And "the tragedy of the commons".
Let's think about "common ownership" of land. Who specifically "owns" it? Everyone in the world?
In my experience (I have been living alone for the last 10 years in two different countries) real estate agencies are way better than private landlords. Sure,you have to pay more in the beginning (they usually want an extra month as fee), but you don't have to deal with a lot of bullshit. Since they have tons of tennants which move in and out all the time, everything is pretty standard and rules are quite clear. No pettiness or crazyness to deal with. Expecially if you rent for a long term, that extra money you pay at the start is a very small price to pay for the peace of mind you get.
I've found the same. Lived in an apartment owned by a big letting agency for 2 years and while it wasn't perfect, it had clear advantages. It was clear that they had numerous apartments with the same fixtures and fittings so anything that got damaged or needed to be replaced, they had ready at short notice, and since they had so many tenants, it was easy to have professionals on staff to service the apartments fairly quickly.
@@krombopulos_michael very true. I also haven't found the rent to be that much higher compared to private landlords, unless blind luck/personal relationships or sketchy situations. In that case it can get very good or really bad, but there is no way to know which one before it's too late.
It is these corporations buying up all that housing and jacking up the rents. Especially foreign companies that don't give a flying fuck about the culture, it's all about the money. I don't think you grasp the horror of all this. Sounds like you're still affluent enough to float above the rabble, taking personal experience and applying it to an idyllic fantasy that doesn't exist.
The problem with landlords is that they are not needed at all, they are middlemen who forcefully insert themselves between property sellers and property buyers. Large proportion of home ownership is a mark of a civilized society.
It's one type of civilised society. It doesn't have to be the only model. There are down-sides too. Home ownership tends to reduce mobility - people get stuck living in an area they might not want to because moving is expensive. A predominantly home-renting society can be just as civilised, if it's set up in such a way that the cost of renting is affordable even to the lowest income levels, and the housing is regulated in order to ensure that even the worst of it is still of a liveable quality. But that isn't what we have.
@@vylbird8014 Given your conditions, yes I would agree with that, but only with the conditions you gave. Which is hardly the case in the real life. Louis Rossman the apple notebook repair guy gives a nice example. Rent is too damn high because of the compound effect of loans on properties being rented out. It's not like the landlords through their evilness put the rent as high as possible, they are forced to do it through agreement on the loan from the bank. Still the effect is that it pretty much nullifies your conditions, meaning that living in US cities from rent point of view is uncivilized.
@@KrupyFren "It's not like the landlords through their evilness put the rent as high as possible..."
I hate to tell you this, I really, really do- but yes, yes they did and do. Not to say that every landlord does, but there's an entire sub-industry of companies that compile rent in a given area and sell that data to landlords to enable them to maximize their rates to the highest tenable rate in the area.
Tenable is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, too-
Landlords are pretty much the most fundamental parasites on the economy possible right? It might be useful to have companies that buy properties from developers and sell them on to the eventual owners, essentially smoothing the process so developers can keep building without too much risk. When companies buy up properties just to rent them out though, they're just getting in the way, making sure people who want to buy the properties for a reasonable price, can't. There should be three situations for houses: the house is owned by the people who live there, the house is in transition, temporarily owned by someone whose entire function is smoothing out the process, or the house is owned by the government and being rented out cheaply so people who can't afford to buy a house have a place to live. It shouldn't be more expensive to be too poor to buy a house.
The system you describe is Cuba's housing system. How's Cuba these days?
@@gardencity3558 Are you seriously trying to say we shouldn't do it because communists also do it? You know we can do this without turning into a dictatorship right? Or do you mean we're going to get invaded by the United States the moment we try to do anything that threatens the wealthy?
@@gardencity3558 Home ownership rate of 85%, and the homeless population is near zero. Except right now, when it shot up because the country was devastated by a hurricane.
Florida gets round-the-clock news coverage. Cuba actually took a far worse beating, but no-one cares about Cuba. It's not considered newsworthy.
@@gregoryford2532 It still has issues with political repression, and the economy has been seriously impaired by long-running sanctions. It's no paradise, but it's not the impoverished hell that American propaganda might lead you to believe either.
@@gregoryford2532 If you ignore near famine, dictatorship and that half the country has fled to Miami ,and of course you've never been there to see real conditions.
Apartment hunting in Fredericton, NB, I ran into dozens of kinds of places. Highlights include a unit where all the doors had been replaced by bead curtains, an old house where the landlord had tried to split the units vertically resulting in a half-dozen half stories at irregular heights, and a spacious basement unit that could only be accessed by squeezing through a 2.5ft gap that didn't deserve to be called a hallway. The best was definitely a place I almost signed the lease on, only to discover at the last minute that I wouldn't be moving into the unit I'd been shown, but instead into its attached walk-in closet, to the surprise of both me and the room's current tenant.
Many years ago I was looking to move within my neighborhood, and had been warned against a particular landlord company, conveniently the one that owned the majority of property in the area. Went to look at a 2 bedroom that was twice what I was paying for a 1 bedroom, but they allowed pets (yay) but the '2 bed room' was half the size of the one bedroom I was living in. Upon researching I learned that at some point they had wanted more apartments to rent, but didn't want to by or build more apartments, so their solution split the existing apartments in half down the middle and split the room into 2 yes half the window and box in a matchbox closet (bedroom required 1 window and a closet) and splitting the kitchen in half, keeping them as '2 bedrooms'. It was as ridiculous as it sounds.
I have ran the london marathon a couple of times and the adrenaline from the crowds will definitely power you through the last stretch. You sound more than prepared Tom so good luck. It is such an amazing experience
Notification alerts working finally!
Still not for me. Ridiculous
In my 15,000-person city, I lived in an apartment in a sub-divided house. The single-family home was divided into 4 apartments, with the ground floor being 2, mine being the two bedrooms in the upstairs, turned into a bedroom, livingroom, and kitchen, and the shed out back being a 4th "apartment."
I love your more casual delivery in this video, very enjoyable.
The solution to the housing crisis is slow and painful, but it's to build shit loads more houses. Building of new houses has plummeted since the postwar boom, despite continuous increases in population since then. Instead of making new houses for people to live in, we're just chopping up more older houses into small and ridiculous flats like the example you've shown here.
The thing is that new buildings are basically always controversial, especially when they're at the kind of scale needed to solve the supply issues. Much like the student accommodation mentioned, they can get bogged down in legal quagmires of objections from local authorities and residents who vote for them, who are generally already comfortably housed and don't want to have any changes. There is no major party who really promotes large scale new house building and opposes local challenges that hold it up.
thats honestly the opposite of what would create true effective change to the system. we need to burn down the majority of the buildings that the well off are safely encasing themselves in to protect them from the wrath of the billions of humans they are trying to starve to death
Unfortunately, simply increasing supply for housing won't fix the issue as much of the cheap housing will be bought up by predatory developers. What you really need to do is abolish landlordism, which you can't do all at once due to a lack of political will but you can accomplish by turning up the heat with reforms like limiting the number of houses that a single landlord can own, as a company or otherwise, and by recognizing tenants' unions as legal entities with bargaining rights. Otherwise, you'll just end up with the same induced housing scarcity as before.
How about we just deport the 1 billion illegals here so 4 million homeless Americans can actually live somewhere. And we can do it without turning nice areas into crime ridden shitholes? Thoughts?
Getting landlords on a registrar is a huge deal because like most associations/regulations it will become tiered and landlords will have to compete with standards to enter each tier.
Imagine if to be considered a C-Grade landlord you had to hire professionals to visit the homes and have an expedient system returning deposits. Or have a person from the association come to inspect the apartment and give it a health rating.
my favourite quirky house was when I had a bedroom was en-suite to a bathroom
you'd go up the stairs, into the bathroom, and there was an archway into my bedroom
it had two power sockets and a single light fitting, on the wall, surrounded by shelving
So many video essays have dropped in the last two days... I'm excited, and also (given the topics), terrified!!
Great video Tom!!!
Does this mean we'll get a "the philosophy of the housing crisis" video?
I lived in an apartment that was a converted attic with zero insulation in all the walls, so it got over 40C in the summer and all the ceilings were 186cm or lower, while I am 183cm tall and had to get plastic LED lights to stop breaking lightbulbs with my head or melting my hair while walking around.
Scarcity is much more effective on essentials. They can make diamonds difficult to buy but we just don't buy them. Can't do the same with housing, food, health care. It's all by design.
The first apartment I lived in was an early 20th century building which at first seems cool, but it was above two bars that allowed smoking, had a narrow carpeted flight of stairs, the floor had splinters and holes, the oven electrocuted us, we got broken into and robbed while in the apartment, and the coolest feature of all, a really creepy defunct elevator shaft in the back. There is a rumor that the building was at one point a butchery and the owner had died in the apartment too.
The best apartment I lived in had the ceiling cave in, which eventually did get fixed, but the communal laundry never worked and the landlords blamed the tenants for it. You could only pay rent in person with a check as well.
Maybe the corpse of that butchery shop owner is laying there at the bottom of the elevator shaft after all these years!
Your weekly reminder that squatting in unused properties is always cool and ethical. Even better if you can do it with friends
and vandalizing the interior, dont just squat
I lived in a basement room where my ceiling was literally the floorboards of the main level. They didn't prep the boards before painting, so paint would fall off every time anyone walked above me. And the cherry on top, it was immediately below the front door, so I got a lovely amount of dirt falling into my bed.
The landlord so graciously offered to drywall/insulate the ceiling... If I paid for it.
Here in Toronto we have that same rule that says that a bedroom has to have a window but there’s nothing that says that it has to be a window to the outside so you see a lot of 1 bedrooms with windows into the living room or kitchen instead
I don't think the housing crisis is just a global north problem, it is happening maybe to a lessen extent on the global south, I'm in Brazil, and we have the tiniest apartment in Latin America, more precisely ins São Paulo, said apartment is 10 Square meters and is 200 thousand reais.
I live in Rio and in my 1 million people city which is 30 km from Rio city center, you can find small apartments which are more than a million reais, it's just crazy.
So in terms of solutions (to landlordism, at least), Georgism and Plural Property both offer fairly easy to implement and fairly well evidenced (by economics standards, anyway) solutions.
Just finished the monopoly video and was trying to find this comment.
In the US and most countries the owner occupant rate has been increasing. Landlords have been selling more than buying. The massive demand problem is coming from owner occupants.
“The system isn’t broken. It’s working in the way it was designed”.
Good luck on your run! You've got this! The association believes in you!
I own a comfortable 2-bed apartment that could, at a push, be converted into a comfortable 3-bed or a less comfortable 4-bed one.
Last year, I saw a flat for sale in my block that was exactly the same size and basic layout as mine but had been converted by a landlord by the addition of internal walls. Into a 5-bed apartment. A horrific little warren of rooms clearly rented out to students who shared a kitchen and a shared 'living room' that had been carved out of a corridor.
Excellent video, and kudos on the incredible mileage accomplishment! I'm glad to learn of Shelter and how they helped you. Best of luck on your run! ❤️🍀
I used to live in a room exactly like this, except even worse! Imagine the diagram you drew except the wall is a little to the right, meaning it lines up with the middle of the window.... So then there's a sharp angle in the new wall to make it line up properly....
I found myself really worried your mom was going to move into the house with The Room. I don't know your mom, but I was really rooting for her, you know?
A landlords video from both Second Thought and now Tom. Lucky me!
landlords provide housing the same way scalpers provide concert tickets
I knew someone who lived in an iteration of „the room“ but tbh I didn’t think it was that bad at the time bc I also knew people living in basement flats with no windows in the bedrooms whatsoever
There is a simple answer to the housing crisis but no one wants to do it because number go down.
Give people homes. Build more homes and put people in those homes. No landlords, no big mortgages, just you get a place to live. With homes people can focus on work without losing there homes and be able to buy things they want and need. Maintain there jobs, family, have food, etc. It's really tough to work if you have no home to go to. No way to wash yourself or stay safe to sleep.
Give people homes. And they can’t sleep in their home without a bed, so give them a bed too. And to inquire about getting a job they’ll probably need a phone and internet. so give them that as well. Should add on food, TP, soap, clothes…Just give everyone what they need. All problems solved ♥️
Give people homes. And they can’t sleep in their home without a bed, so give them a bed too. And to inquire about getting a job they’ll probably need a phone and internet. so give them that as well. Should add on food, TP, soap, clothes…Just give everyone what they need. All problems solved ♥️
@@cassie3125 I get it cassie, you hate humans.
This is how I imagine every british house
me, living in the attic with kitchen+bathroom being fully separated from the bedroom: i'm living you life, man
Good video, man! And good luck for the marathon, the best I can run while still enjoying myself is half that distance, and boy is it hard!
Landlords are leeches and maybe (definitely) shouldn't be a thing. In other news, the sky is blue.
While there is a place in society for landlords, as renting can be handy if you're not confident you'll be staying in one location for more than a few years, the scales are tipped way too heavily in the landlords' favour at the moment. I was lucky my landlord and agent as a tenant was one of the good ones (got professionals to fix problems fast, actually sold me the apartment for a good deal when the landlord wanted to put it on the market), but many of my friends weren't that lucky, and it sucks that it's legal to leave tenants in a lurch. A landlord's job is to provide housing to others. If they're neglecting their job, there should be consequences for it
Britain needs a mass housebuilding effort ASAP. Take away landlords bargaining power it should be 10 landlords begging and bargaining for 1 tenant, not the other way around.
Great video as always and cheers for running a marathon! Big respect