Sure, we can allow some small percentage of the overall housing to be owned by businesses whose sole purpose is providing a good rental housing experience for those in transit. But that’s fundamentally different than parasitic landlords whose only job is owning a property and periodically scheduling the cheapest maintenance workers to do actual work they can.
This isn’t your governments legislation branch, I’m not proposing a 100 page documentation. I’m simply suggesting a policy direction which is housing should be for housing, not for investment or for rent collection. If someone makes money off of someone they should provide a meaningful service and I think if housing wasn’t an investment vehicle the entire system would look so radically different people can’t imagine what a system without some landlords existing would look like.
Imagine everyone owned their house, it wasn’t expensive, selling one was like selling a car, but you could sell to the government if need be at no meaningful loss and the government sold them back to people like a service for just such a situation.
Idk man, it’s not that hard.
You’re saying a large complex issue has many ways of tackling it to improve it? And that some random 3 paragraph response suggesting we improve the system by trying anything isn’t a full write up on the exact policy choices we should implement down to the letter of the law?
/s
Yes, obviously improving wages would help people afford things. Yes, helping construction workers improve their process would help make housing costs cheaper. There’s a thousand easy to implement ideas that would help the problem. ONE of those is “don’t treat housing like an investment vehicle akin to stocks”. Housing should be for housing, not for the wealthy to make a steady stream of income off of relatively poorer people. Landlords serve no function except for in a society where owning and trading homes is an expensive, slow, and bureaucratic process. Landlords are simply a means for money to transfer from the less wealthy to the more wealthy. They are an unnecessary cost that inflates the price of housing to the benefit of an extremely small number of people.
To be extremely clear, this is not the only solution. This may not even be a silver bullet. I am not listing the 1000 page legal proposal you can implement in your country tomorrow. My goal is to simply shift the common perception of landlords from “they totally have to exist and wow I love giving them money every month for absolutely nothing - boy owning things sure seems like a burden, thankfully I’ll never have to worry about that because I couldn’t afford to own something even if I wanted to” to “of course landlords are bad for society.” Or even “landlords are by and large capitalistic parasites that slow progress towards a more equitable society by draining people with less wealth of their means of becoming wealthy. Society doesn’t need them, even if you can think of reasons to have temporary housing there are better means than some rich person raising the rent every year on you.”