If you had just said from the start your only point is that it's a useful tactic for avoiding charges of hypocrisy this thread would be 2 pages shorter
i don't think not buying a house is a substitute for struggle because im not a liberal but i think its just the minimum level of conduct required - you have to rent to get somewhere to live, you certainly don't have to cash in inherited wealth and play the market to your advantage to grab a piece of land. whatever
blinkandwheeze posted:settlerists choosing to give their money to a nazi landlord instead of a nazi bank is just an aesthetic consumer decision afforded by being a settler in the first place i think.
What if my hasid landlord is anti-zionist tho
blinkandwheeze posted:in terms of complicity with the material reproduction of settlerist white supremacy, what difference actually is there besides the purely symbolic? in what sense does someone who is in the position of being able to own property obstruct these mechanisms by choosing to fund a landlord's coke habit instead?
Home ownership is arduous and takes up all your time. Buying a house means preserving its value on behalf of the bank for the life of the mortgage. I think that is a non symbolic difference
Petrol posted:it can also mean just having a roof over your head without being beholden to a landlord and paying their mortgage for them. you don't get to check out of settlerist society anymore than you get to check out of capitalism, you know
I guess I don't trust that people who become landlords are going to be motivated to jail all the landlords
chances seem really low that i can do it though, which is insane, i have a really good job and buying a house still seems like a herculean task of accumulating capital for the down payment. i guess i could stop supporting my family!!!! good system
it's not as simple as "white people are all settlers" is it? i would bet most of the white new world people in this forum are descendants of underclasses moved around by various capitalist projects of expropriation and/or war, forcibly migrated as imperial tools to produce/reproduce their land claims and oppression.
it's not like our grandparents or great-x-grandparents though ooh let's get fucked over by the Enclosures and be forced into getting on a boat to an empty wildland of -30 C blizzards away from everything we've ever known, or ooh let's get owned by nazis and resettled by the allies into remote, cold plains, away from our surviving families and our homes, this is cool, yes, haha indians fuck you
it's true that people bought the lie of "these our are lands now" but realizing now this is a lie doesn't solve the problem that we exist. wallowing in the feeling that like are a blight on the americas is not helpful. we just have to deal with reality as it exists now and try to cooperatively construct a decent situation for native people and resettled people.
(i have been reading a lot about caribbean history for school and, as you might imagine, it makes u think)
i still think the process should stop obviously and we should string up the orchestrators of the occupations and invasions, but we should all do it together.
drwhat posted:whats the difference between getting mad at people for trying to exit the rent system and getting mad at indentured servants in the 16th & 17th century americas for buying their own freedom through a certain number of years of work?
For someone who today has the resources to consider buying a house, the rent system is not comparable to indentured servitude in 1600s Amerika. Buying a house is not freeing. Even after you own a house outright, in most places by law you are required to preserve its value and to not let dozens of homeless people move in to form a militia. The alternative to the long term preservation of your castle is planning to resell it, which still means treating it as an investment, in which case congrats, you directly participated in the exact kind of gentrification that led to home ownership being unaffordable for most people in the first place.
In buying land you as a professed socialist / communist are setting yourself up with an obligation to perpetuate land enclosure. And your actions have a more powerful sway over your beliefs in the long term than any resolution or logic.
tpaine posted:i live in a fucking trash can
stegosaurus posted:yeah its not like you sign the papers and directly take responsibility for the massacre nearest your house. its that you buy into the entire racist structure of real estate which has origins in genocide etc. its sort of like joining the military in that by joining you arent necessarily taking personal responsibility for all dead iraqi children but whatever critique you have of that institution is overshadowed by the fact that you sustain it and benefit from it materially.
(after not reading the last page and a halF) the alternative is giving your money to a parasitic landlord?
(i dont own a house or nothin, but)
Edited by ilmdge ()
tpaine posted:i live in a fucking trash can
welcome back. i have your new profile pic:
swampman posted:in most places by law you are required to preserve its value and to not let dozens of homeless people move in
i am not familiar with these laws in canada, though i admit they could exist. i know modifications to houses inside of city limits need to be approved, but i think if you're outside of them you can do what you want?
and is there really an enforced limit to number of tenants or something? I've been in houses in seattle with tons of people living there
i would believe anything about the US, but in Canada I've never heard of, idk, the police doing random spot checks to see that your house doesn't have too many people in it or something
(i am not arguing this point just curious)
drwhat posted:swampman posted:in most places by law you are required to preserve its value and to not let dozens of homeless people move in
i am not familiar with these laws in canada, though i admit they could exist. i know modifications to houses inside of city limits need to be approved, but i think if you're outside of them you can do what you want?
and is there really an enforced limit to number of tenants or something? I've been in houses in seattle with tons of people living there
i would believe anything about the US, but in Canada I've never heard of, idk, the police doing random spot checks to see that your house doesn't have too many people in it or something
(i am not arguing this point just curious)
Afaik there is no hard and fast federal occupancy formula or limit, it's simply based on "reasonableness", and generally something like 2 tenants per bedroom + 1 is seen as fairly reasonable. This obviously doesn't really affect homeowners because yeah no one is checking unless it's to the point that other people complain. Mainly it's important for landlords, who can set their own occupancy limits so long as they aren't discriminatory (mainly toward families). In the city where I live where there's a lot of students you would get in trouble with the landlord if they found out you were above the house occupancy limit.
edit: this is the United States btw
swampman posted:Yall prospective homeowners should take a look at the full cost of squatting somewhere until you suddenly own it, vs actually going down to a god damn bank and having to shake hands with one of those butter skinned maniacs in their old timey office clothes
the legal principle behind this is called adverse possession and is one of the mo interesting things i learned about in law school. basically, in the us at least, if you occupy land for a certain period (in my state it's 18 years and can apparently be up to 40) and it goes uncontested, you can then assert ownership. some hangups:
it has to be open and notorious, so you can't hide in some unused corner and hope it goes unnoticed, popping out after 21 years and saying gotcha!
it has to be actual possession, meaning you have to use the land as an actual owner would. for a house, you have to maintain it like a resident, meaning cutting the lawn, etc. if you dont have utilities connected for years at a time, then its probably not going to work
it has to be hostile possession, meaning without the actual owner's permission. this combined with open and notorious is rough, because it has to be essentially trespassing in the open, meaning the actual owner will likely notice at some point and kick your ass off
it has to be continuous use, meaning you cant just pop in every now and then to use it. for rural land, you cant just cut some trees down once a year or something. for a house, you cant have an annual pool party but otherwise live somewhere else
it has to be exclusive use, meaning the actual owner cant be using it for any purpose at all
you also cant be paying rent, because then youre just a tenant. any lease ruins a claim because it fails the hostile possession test
so there you go. squatters rights are an actual thing, sort of.
property law as descended from british common law is by and large absolutely terrible, boring, confusing, and stupid. if you are ever bored google the rule against perpetuities. long-dead english people are the absolute worst
TG posted:long-dead english people are the absolute worst
try being around living ones
blinkandwheeze posted:a mass exodus to the british isles is likely not feasible but at the very least it actually makes you less of a settler,
drwhat posted:i am not familiar with these laws in canada, though i admit they could exist. i know modifications to houses inside of city limits need to be approved, but i think if you're outside of them you can do what you want?
and is there really an enforced limit to number of tenants or something? I've been in houses in seattle with tons of people living there
i would believe anything about the US, but in Canada I've never heard of, idk, the police doing random spot checks to see that your house doesn't have too many people in it or something
(i am not arguing this point just curious)
Even out in the countryside you're supposed to file with your local department of buildings whenever you do significant construction of any kind. This makes sense so you don't get a bunch of guys like grover constructing amazingly dangerous things and then saying "Yep it's a bit of land, got a house on it, just the way I bought it" and then the new property owners all die and nobody can hold grover responsible. Obviously guys like grover get away with a lot anyway. Likewise there really are fire codes and maximum occupancies which would prevent me from buying a house and then filling every room with bunk beds. These things are super selectively enforced but it's not like the codes are obscure policies, if you flout them and the city or state has any reason to dislike you they can fine the piss out of you and eventually put chains all over the shit and ban you all to fuck. Also if you let your property fall into disrepair your neighbors can sue you for causing their property values to decline, and win.
Like I say, selective enforcement: in my neighborhood I know a building where FDNY shows up every few months and pounds on the door for a bit and all the neighbors, we're talkin like 30-40 illegal units with 2-4 tenants each, know not to answer. FDNY has no official proof the building is inhabited and they don't try hard to get it. Try squatting in an empty building for 1 day and FDNY+NYPD will kick their way in to remove you. It's also easy to get away with illegal construction on country property, until you start doing something (like housing lots of homeless) that catches official notice.
NYC is kind of a special case because even being a leaseholder here is like being a small time landlord in a lot of contexts, there's an extra layer of somewhat obscured social stratification.
blinkandwheeze posted:i know nobody is legitimately calling for mass expulsion of whites,
I am