Landlords

"Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed." Karl Marx

At one time in history, landlords literally were lords. In the manorial and feudal systems of medieval Europe, all land was owned by a lord who allowed peasants to live on his property in return for labor.

The concept of a landlord may be traced back to the feudal system of manoralism (seignorialism), where a landed estate is owned by a Lord of the Manor (mesne lords), usually members of the lower nobility which came to form the rank of knights in the high medieval period, holding their fief via subinfeudation, but in some cases the land may also be directly subject to a member of higher nobility, as in the royal domain directly owned by a king, or in the Holy Roman Empire imperial villages directly subject to the emperor. The medieval system ultimately continues the system of villas and latifundia (peasant-worked broad farmsteads) of the Roman Empire.

In this medieval farming economy, a form of barter became established between the landlord and his serfs, the name for village farmers. In exchange for protection, each serf owed his landlord a fixed portion of the crop yield from the farmland that he occupied usually for his lifetime. That fixed portion (food, not money) was the serf’s “rent,” and the rent literally fed the lord and his household. We now see the historical origin of the term “landlord.”

Originally, then, rent was actual produce from the land and linked entirely to the land, not to a building or a part of a building. At the same time, the serfs were also bound to the land for life. They were not “free men.” They could not be evicted. But they had the security of a permanent food source.

In this ancient landlord-tenant exchange that endured for centuries, the landlord had nothing to do with the serfs’ homes. He did not build them; the serfs did. And he had no obligation to maintain or repair the serfs’ homes. That was their responsibility, and serfs were fully skilled in every aspect of the home structure. If the home was destroyed, the rent was still owed because the land was all-important.

In modern times, landlord describes any individual(s) or entity (e.g. government body or institution) providing housing for persons who cannot afford or do not want to own their own homes. They may be peripatetic, stationed on a secondment away from their home, not want the risk of a mortgage and/or negative equity, may be a group of co-occupiers unwilling to enter into the ties of co-ownership, or may be improving their credit rating or bank balance to obtain a better-terms future mortgage.

In 1903, a leftwing feminist called Lizzy Magie, an American game designer, writer and Georgist, patented the board game ‘The”Landlord's Game”, the precursor to that we now know as “Monopoly”, to illustrate teachings of the progressive era economist Henry George, but she never gets the credit.

Today, landlords are property owners who rent homes, apartments and condominiums as a business. Tenants are supposed to pay rent. Landlords are supposed to provide safe housing. "Supposed to" doesn't always happen. Slum housing and rogue landlords are symptoms of a private market that has failed; of a capitalism that has for too long functioned unchecked.

A slumlord (or slum landlord) is a slang term for a landlord, generally an absentee landlord with more than one property, who attempts to maximize profit by minimizing spending on property maintenance, often in deteriorating neighborhoods, and to tenants that they can intimidate…

Food for thought!