You assume that they are all overcharging wildly and that all maintenance is trivial. Mortgages are an actual thing, go buy some property and find out. People rent out property to make a profit, not out of love. Also, living in a home or apt you pay for isn’t a “privilege” anymore than the food I buy is.
unbelievably derivative and completely incompetent
You had me thinking you wanted to make an intelligent point until you broke out the shitpost. You got me!
The issue is the profitable part. The landlord purchases and rents a property because it’s profitable. So presumably, with enough starting capital, the tenants could be living there, with their own mortgage, for less. In addition, their mortgage payment would be going towards equity rather than funneling to a landlord. The distaste for landlords exists because for many rental situations, it is literally someone with money, leveraging their money against someone with less money. People don’t have the option to not live anywhere, so they are forced into extractive contracts.
Indeed, we should eliminate all landlords and then everyone who wants to not live with family or friends who already own a house should obviously just get a 15 or 30 year mortgage. I’m sure you qualified for one at 18, or maybe 26. And it is really easy and convenient to sell your house/condo/apartment every few years if you want or need to move regularly. There is never a viable condition for renting. But if somehow there were to be a magical condition where one would rent, then clearly the trading of goods and services for money only works if each transaction is specifically priced to only and exactly cover the input costs. Making profit is immoral after all. You know what they say, people and businesses only exist because of the joy derived from watching others consume the products of their labor. Has this comment gotten annoyingly snarky yet?
Now we as a society should start treating housing as a commodity and produce it in vast numbers so that supply continuously meets or exceeds demands. We should also implement a Georgist land use tax to prevent mass corporate ownership of housing so that housing prices fall comparably to what they were in the 50s and 60s. We probably want to slowly phase that change in though, because housing as an investment is the only thing propping up the middle class currently, and if every primary residence home owner was suddenly under water by double or tripple or more of their existing mortgages then bad things happen. Tenent owned cooperative housing complexes might even be cool too.
