Being a socialist, a radical, or an anarchist is not the same as 'bitching loudly on the internet every day'.

oh no won't anybody think of the landlords

Lol, this complete mess boils down to “landlords are people too”?

no. It's more like, what if "the landlord" is a group of comrades and they want to evict someone for being a racist who starves their dog and did unsafe electrical wiring that could burn the building down.

Sounds like Finland 'thought of the landlords' and included them in achieving their solution.

housing co-operatives are not landlords they are housing co-operatives

Donald Trump is the kind of fuckcrustable tenant from hell that would do some general chumpfuckery

Landlordy needy drinky 😔

okay, let me know when y'all agree on what is or isn't a landlord and who can or can't evict someone without being considered a horrible person

and if a house cooperative wants to evict a member...?

Don’t make me tap the sign lads

don't be so obtuse - the animating idea behind housing first is one that is so radical because it is so simple: solve homelessness by giving homeless people homes, no strings attached. of course there is a relatively complex web of civic institutions, landlords, politicians etc that had to be engaged and cajoled to deliver this, and people had to negotiate complex legal issues, property rights, land/property acquisition etc. but by underpinning their approach with a very simple idea they were able to wrestle with (and in many cases overcome) all of the complex pathologies that feed into, birth, and thrive on homelessness

I'm not being obtuse, it is complex. I think it's important to underline the difference between the concept of the idea and then the effort required to make it work. And to be fair, homelessness and rental costs are two related but different things. I was taking Vienna as an example of a complex rental system that works at reducing costs and make affordable living available to most people, which doesn't end a homeless problem, but does help. In order to eradicate homelessness you need another set of policies (that required 12 years in the case of Finland) that are, as you described, also complex.

None of these solutions came from 'fuck landlords they shouldn't exist' which is a simplistic (and negative) approach to something that requires a ton of effort and invention.

and if a house cooperative wants to evict a member...?

― the unappreciated charisma of cows (Aimless), Tuesday, 10 November 2020 20:29 (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

do you think the definition of a landlord is someone who evicts someone?

no. but milo makes no distinction in that regard. eviction justifies malicious damage, because eviction entails a risk and the evicting party is a capitalist in all cases in milo world.

what distinction do you think should be made?

Btw cannot tell you how cool it is to see an interesting thread revived with a dead argument from yesterday for the purposes of stirring shit, and to come in and see at least four people jumping on one person, really makes you feel welcome as a leftist on the board. Absolutely do not care, btw, if you’re justifying this to yourself out of anything other than personal dislike, because some of us manage to not follow around posters we don’t get on with from thread to thread for... I’m not sure the reason exactly, and I can’t admit to caring much.

I’m trying to have a conversation with Milo which is why I asked him about Housing First in Finland, if you keep answering to the shit, surely it won’t be a good discussion.

uh I revived this thread because I was mentioned in the other thread but the other thread had like hundreds of new posts since, so I revived this thread because the post in question smacked as an example of "bitching loudly on the internet" without knowledge or engagement in actual radical or anarchist praxis ... but hey, you dislike me so much you have me killfiled so ...

I swear conversations are better when you assume someone else experiences and knows stuff, I’m certain Milo has some valuable experiences with radical and anarchist praxis.

fuck landlords they shouldn't exist

welcome back, Left!

This and the US politics thread at present have convinced me that I need to take a step back from ILE.

See y'all on ILM and ILB.

Is there seriously no rent control whatsoever in the UK?

Don't see how actions could be taken without ideas first, don't see ideas would move around in people's heads and from person to person without communicating (perhaps in a bitchy way, online)

xp

Ed Miliband got labelled a dangerous communist for putting a "progressive"* rent capping policy in his 2015 manifesto

*i.e. not very bloody good really!

My in laws lived in a flat with fixed rent and it was an absolutely perfect example of how it should work. They ended up having to leave the flat after the landlord did a load of refurbishments so to be allowed to raise the rent and after that they had to move. It was really sad when they had lived there for over forty years.

Fuck renovictions.

what's the trendy term now ... "iterative"? It's an "iterative" process -- people have ideas and "bitch loudly" and then test them and see if they could work, and then refine the ideas and the "bitching loudly" and then maybe that results in different ideas or methods that better accomplish the ideas ... there is so much to bitch loudly about though, as a leftist. Keep bitching!

My in laws lived in a flat with fixed rent and it was an absolutely perfect example of how it should work. They ended up having to leave the flat after the landlord did a load of refurbishments so to be allowed to raise the rent and after that they had to move. It was really sad when they had lived there for over forty years.

― scampus fugit (gyac), Tuesday, November 10, 2020 1:08 PM (three minutes ago)

Ugh, that sucks. Was there a system where they got a payout or any compensation based on the length of time lived there and their ages?

what distinction do you think should be made?

housing is a physical space. a housing cooperative may define itself in such a way that it does or does not control who may occupy the physical spaces that fall under its agreement. if it is defined so that it may evict someone, then it may evict them. eviction is not a necessary function of a housing cooperative.

Is there seriously no rent control whatsoever in the UK?

You won't find too many UK based ILXors objecting to milo's opinion of landlords.

You don't get evicted from a co-op. You get your membership terminated resulting in losing the right to occupy the suite. The distinction is that the co-op, to various degrees, determine how that termination occurs, rather than an external body such as your local tenancy branch or government office. eg. by a 50% or 90% or unanimous vote of the members, with or without cause etc.

the distinction being that a co-operative is a community of some sort. while we can talk about the toxicity of communities, the viciousness with which communities can treat difficult or problematic individuals, this is very different from being evicted by a rent-seeking individual or corporation.

any housing association that i've known or had any involvement with has had the intent of ameliorating or off-setting the harmful effects of landlordism. Although limited by resources, there is an idealistic intent (off communality, sharing) distinct from simply rent-seeking. One would hope though this is not always the case, that such projects would have processes for what to do when community breaks down due to conflict or the violation of its terms. You would hope that there would be systems for conciliation where possible and that eviction would be a last resort.

Part of the difficulty is that housing co-operatives are often small scale, with limited resources for handling difficult cases. What can you do with a particularly problematic individual when there are no resources to accommodate them elsewhere? If we were talking about local-government-owned social housing, which similarly seeks to provide housing for people, one would assume increased responsibility and duty-of-care for a problematic tenant. Housing is a right, even for people with addiction issues and mental health problems. Even for racists and homophobes (its worth noting that the list of things that cause individuals to be excluded from communities can include things that say some pretty unsavoury stuff about communities). The more embattled and limited the resources of a community are, the less that can be done to offset expulsion and exclusion.

However, these are all distinct problems from the problems of landlords. If eviction is "not a necessary function of a housing cooperative" can the same be said of landlords? landlordism is the most basic example rentierism, seeking profit not by doing anything or making anything but granting or withholding access to a limited resource: housing. Tenants don't pay money to landlords for something that landlords do for them personally, but because otherwise they would be evicted and, depending on their circumstances, be made homeless.

In the UK landlords are one of the most effective lobby groups; political support by both parties for ongoing evictions throughout covid one of their most recent victories. Frequently you will hear landlords playing up how difficult it is to be a landlord, how it barely makes any money! Often they will claim that since the combined cost of upkeep and mortgage payments is little more than mortgage, they barely break even. These are remarkable claims that completely gloss over the fact that these people are acquiring large assets they can subsequently sell that are simultaneously appreciating in value!

The flat above me is a small, two-bedroom council flat bought through right-to-buy and turned by a landlord (who owns properties all over the borough through private limited companies) into a miserable three bedroom flat with no windows in the shared living spaces which consist of a tiny kitchen and bathroom. Here there is no ideal of community, no social responsibility. There is nothing except the opportunity to pay this man's mortgage so he can acquire more miserable flats to exploit more overworked renters.

great post plax.

Yep. I worked as a mortgage advisor for a while (my number one bullshit job!) and almost without exception, Buy to Let landlords with multiple properties are just greedy middle/'professional' class fucks with plenty of disposable income.

let's not judge Chairman Mao too harshly.

Yeah great post plax. Clearly there are always going to be problems which need to be solved, but the problems associated with everyone being housed are obviously preferable to those associated with homelessness and rampant landlordism. I don’t think expressing that sentiment requires you to have solutions for all those problems.

Good post, plax. A landlord who maintains rent at an affordable level and who doesn't skimp on upkeep is a potentially fine proposition, and these do exist – more so in my neck of the woods than in the UK – but they are so rare as to be irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. It is a form of parasitism more often than not.

Plax has put the problem well. Whatever it takes to 'decouple' property from its owners, call it communism or something else.

Welcome back, xyzzzz

That's alright, thanks

I guess as much as I’d like to see western hegemony smashed and believe that Degrowth policies are the only way to even begin to address climate catastrophe, I’m not quite a full-on Maoist yet. I suppose my dirtiest secret is... I’m technically a landlord. I have an older home w a secondary kitchen. It’s not technically a duplex so the setup is somewhere between housemates and a full-on landlord/ tenant situation.

But if my renters ever decide to rise up and kill me it’ll probably be bc I had it coming

In the UK landlords are one of the most effective lobby groups; political support by both parties

both parties full of fuckin landlords, incidentally, and voting repeatedly against any control on landlords without declaring a hint of a conflict of interest

Bingo.

they finally did manage to get some amendment to the Fit for Human Habitation bill through parliament in 2019. Which is obv completely toothless unless you are wealthy enough to take your landlord to court going by some of the recent everyday horror stories of private tenants I've read.

fuck landlords

combination of dn and post there is p fitting

joined up with dsa finally, going to try helping out with the mutual aid group. going to try and focus on that instead of posting about left-wing politics on the internet which has been such a black hole for me the past year.

honestly, the reason I haven't joined dsa is that it would put me in close proximity with the kinds of people who join dsa (not all of them obviously, but the irony poisoned contingent)

honestly, the reason I haven't joined dsa is that it would put me in close proximity with the kinds of people who join dsa

hahaha i love this

lol see thread title