this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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If we remove landlords from the picture, we get a bunch of housing on the market.
I own my own home now, but I've rented in the past. Eliminating rentals is an awful idea.
I moved a lot when I was younger: for education, jobs, etc. Buying a house every time I moved (knowing I was likely in an area temporarily) would have been a fucking nightmare -- rentals fill a legitimate need.
Sure: fix the problems of price gouging and profiteering. Put strong limits on the number of single family homes one can rent, and outright stop corporations from buying single family homes. Increase protections for tenents and drive slumlords and absentee landlords out of business. But the idea of "just buy a house, lol" is absurd.
Nobody is saying "just buy a house," because everybody is complaining about how the lack of housing is a major part of the issue. Apart from what you said on imposing limits and increasing protections for renters, the other main issue is to diverge equity from housing. Having the main way to accrue wealth be tied to the basic necessity of having a roof over your head puts a major incentive on people and corporations to buy up property. Housing becomes an investment at that point, not a service. There are people and companies sitting on empty houses because driving up the market by removing inventory is a more profitable investment than actually renting them out.
And if there were more options besides single family housing, people wouldn't be forced to buy a house every time they moved as well. The US especially is really bad at this. We have high density apartments and condos, and single family homes, but a major lack of medium density housing. If we had more multi-family homes, duplexes, town houses, and smaller scale apartment and condo buildings, this would be a lot less of an issue. With more variety in housing types, the demand for single family homes would be a lot less and would help to reduce housing prices and make things more affordable for those who do want to buy a house.
That doesn't mean we get a bunch of people with down payments and higher wages to afford these properties though. Housing prices would need to fall a lot for that to occur and if it did, it'd put many of the people who were able to scrape together the money to buy a house underwater on their mortgages.