why landlords cannot be ethical

Bonjour!

SOURCES/RESSOURCES 📚

Go check @Kelgore videos! That's where I found most of the landlords featured in this video :)
Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, 1892.
Rowan Moore, "Margaret Thatcher began Britain's obsession with property. It's time to end it", The Guardian, 2014.

Other sources can be found throughout the video :)

MUSIC 🎙

SOCIALS 👩‍💻
Storygraph: @alicecappelle
Instagram: @alicecappelle_
Twitter: @cappelle_alice

[restpostenbasti]

about to send this to my landlord. thanks :)

[tabularasa]

I appreciate your macro view of questioning "land ownership" in the first place. I lived in Hawaii many years ago. I took some Hawaiian studies classes at UH, and learned about the concept of ahupua‘a. Prior to European takeover, these equitable divisions were each collectively managed, and the concept of private land "ownership" wasn't really a thing, because resources of the land belonged to everyone in the community. Learning about this concept really forced me to rethink everything I had been conditioned to believe about property

[Jazzmaster]

Glad you brought up SpaceX here. I'm a long-time spaceflight and astronomy fan, and it's frustrating how much credit Elon Musk gets for that company when he isn't even an engineer. The COO (Chief Operations Officer) of SpaceX is actually a woman in her 50's named Gwynne Shotwell, who is an *actual* engineer. Of course, she gets nowhere near the fame or credit because she's not an epic memes posting billionaire bro, but that's a subject for another day perhaps.

[MeghanCreative]

"Value is not created by the few who invest but by the many who create." Love that!

[sheccabaw]

"I only do this to vacant properties cause I don't think it's ethical to throw someone out of their home" 😂😂😂 The bar is SO LOW

[litost]

i love how Alice is so passionate and soberly reasonable at the same time <3

[jernaugurgeh]

Thank you so much for highlighting Thatchers destruction of social housing in the UK. This was achieved by selling them to the tenants at below market rates ('right-to-buy') taking into account what they had paid in rent... and then legislating to prevent councils from building more replacemeent social housing. This neoliberal paradigm has resulted in the housing crisis we face today, with properties at ridiculously high market rates meaning that anyone who is not wealthy or already on the housing ladder just cannot buy a home, and private rent prices that are increasingly unaffordable.

Several years back, Jeremy Corbyn (lovely lefty leader of the Labour Party opposition at the time) made a suggestion that perhaps 'right-to-buy' should be extended to private tenants, meaning that if they want to buy the house they have lived in long term, they should be able to with all the rent they have paid taken into account to reduce the price. Cue the spectacle of hypocritical uproar by conservative snowflakes in this increasingly regressively demented nation, resulting in further assassination attempts on his character in the hard-right Tory-supporting press.... meaning he lost the general election of 2019, and Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson got to rest his clown shoes as King Spaffer on the PM's desk at Number 10. The rest, as you know, is godawful history.

We've been stuck with Thatcher's bastard offspring in power for the past 12 very long years, and in that time homelessness has doubled. With the current cost-of-capitalism crisis and the highest domestic energy prices in the entire world, I can easily seeing it doubling again in a far shorter time.

[pendragon]

Well said, Alice! Too many human rights get treated like privileges in the United States unfortunately. I remember the great speech from It's A Wonderful Life when he confronts the slum lord, "What was that, you said a minute ago? They have to work and save and wait--wait? Wait for what? For their children to grow old and leave them? Til they're so old and broken down, it doesn't matter anymore. Just remember this, Mr. Potter: this--rabble you're talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Is it too much to ask that they work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn't think so. People were human beings to him, but to you, a warped, frustrated old man, they're just cattle."

[guaxary]

The best paradox is that the people who own multiple properties are also strongly against development in the suburbs where they live, immigration, and social programs making it easier for people to have children (even so basic as maternity leave or free public education).

[ahmed]

When you said "Why is housing a commodity to be traded ?" my mind upgraded itself.

[BN-xklf]

"we have hundreds of uninhabited airbnb and houses, and millions of homeless people in the streets"
Numbers for France in 2020 are 300.000 peoples in the streets (not counting bad and precarious housing) and 3 millions uninhabited housing (counting temporarly vacant and unsanitary housing). Even if the numbers are to be taken with caution, i think its worth noting

[geode]

My city (Seattle) recently voted to approve social housing and I hope it makes housing more accessible.

[WilliamSitu]

It's funny that there is this term in economics, "rent seeker", which was made to apply to those trying to gain wealth without creating value to society, but it somehow isn't referring to landlords. Looking at the economic definition of rent, I still think it applies to landlords.

[esterelina]

You're such a good speaker. I love how you manage to fit so much information in short videos, while at the same time making them very clear and digestible. I never get tired of listening to you :)

[MattnUska]

I didn’t catch if you brought this up but I think the major problem is that by snatching up all these properties and upgrading them they are artificially driving up prices. Where I live a small two bedroom house has gone from $180k to $300k in a matter of 7 years. I understand supply and demand but that’s just insane.

[zanay]

It's a tricky thing, though. Like, my landlord owns the building that we live in because his parents bought it in the 1950s. He has a policy of never raising rent, meaning that the previous guy who lived here was paying $500/mo until the day he died (that's just unheard of--we live in San Francisco and are renting it for six times the cost now). It's true that my landlord didn't renovate the property himself, but he put in the money to have high quality modern appliances installed and preserve the original hardwood floors, even though he still could have rented it out for this price without investing that much money into it because the housing market in San Francisco is ridiculous. During the pandemic, he also proactively lowered rent.

So the way I see it, being a landlord is unethical, but so is buying a smartphone or having a job that in any way contributes to the reinforcement of power structures (so...almost all jobs). I think you can work to reform the system, support more public housing, battle against NIMBYism, but you still have to live in the society you live in right now. And I'd rather have my landlord than most others. So then the phrase "X is unethical" becomes too abstract to be useful. Maybe one day, we will live in a world in which the building I live in will be owned by the government, and the government will preserve it as well as this guy has. That sounds like a pretty good world, and I'm happy to fight for it! But in the meantime, I don't think that what my landlord is doing is unethical 🤷

[intentionallymadi]

This is why I find it so interesting that so many people my age (mid-late 20s) are still so obsessed with home ownership. Like yes, in our current system, renting is terrible because renters have so few rights and properties are usually privately owned. But wouldn't it be better if we didn't HAVE to own a house to have stable and reliable housing? Wouldn't it be better if everyone had access to stable, safe, reliable housing regardless of whether or not they 'own' it? I don't know how that would work in our current system (social housing I guess? that's actually well maintained) but idk, I feel like the solution of 'everyone should own their home' is not super feasible. Should students/people early in their careers have to own a home to deserve stable and reliable housing? I don't think so! I think that's a basic human right that everyone should have regardless of their stage of life. But maybe that's just too far away from our current system to focus on, which is why it seems like people are currently more interested in making it easier to buy homes. Which btw I don't think is a bad thing, more so I just wonder why we're so obsessed with ownership and if that can really be the solution we want it to be.

[ordan]

"There is a discrepancy between the value they produce, and the money they receive for it"
Huge agree. I think this nuance is super important, and gets overlooked a lot.
Landlords DO add SOME value, but it's absolutely not worth the rents that are charged.
It's good that our societies have a way for young people to start living out of home, without needing to buy a home themselves. It's also good to have a housing system that lets you live somewhere without committing to the place long term, and it's good that our housing system has incentives for people to improve houses, without needing every single person to do it themselves etc etc.
So when landlords say "we add value!"... that's true...
But in exchange for that value, they expect tenants to pay the mortgage on the property...? That's absurd

[politepupper]

Unfortunately, as a common law jurisdiction lawyer (Australia), I recall learning that our western-Anglo conception of property ownership requires “the exclusion” of others. Property must not be “vacated/abandoned” it must be “fenced off and padlocked” to bar (no pun intended) people from claiming squatters rights.
Property law is predicated on the conception of property being “scare” but it isn’t. We could make more and make the land more hospitable in a lot of cases. But you are right property is a necessity. 😔

[miguelconamor]

A landlord saying that "they" renovated the property they're renting out is like a 15th century Renaissance patron saying "they" painted the Mona Lisa