They still exist here and there. Generally speaking, they're cheaper than the big corporate brands but also significantly less responsive because its one guy and his two sons pretending they can handyman their way through a forty unit complex that hasn't had a proper renovation since the 1980s. Because they don't have the state-of-the-art fuck-you-rent-goes-up optimization computers, they get a lot of lower income and longer term tenants. But they're also prime for buy-outs from folks with infinity borrowed-at-0% financing.

So what you'll often see is a large community of people who hate their old small landlord because they have to maintain properties they don't own double-plus hate their new big landlord even harder for jacking up rent to force them out and bulldoze the space.

she was just renting out her basement not hording housing.

Its frustrating, because a lot of this isn't an individualist "hording housing" problem nearly so much as it is an institutional "we only have ranch style housing that sells for $1000/sqft" problem. So while renting your basement is far from the worst landlordism imaginable, it is still functionally profiting from a shortage of housing that your home functionally represents.

Its not her fault. She's just in a position to glean rents off a problem she has no control over, while you are not.

[+] CrimsonSage@hexbear.net 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] zifnab25@hexbear.net 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There will always be people who need transient housing for legitimate reasons;

Sure. But, like, we used to have this idea of dorms in schools where they were an amenity of the school. Similarly, the businesses that need temporarily labor are - functionally - on the hook for the cost of their housing already. Short term housing isn't a problem unknown to planned economies. Some of the nicest hotels in the world were in the USSR.

I would prefer to see some family get help staying in their own home than see some corporate landlord vacuum more wealth out of communities.

Oh sure, if we're talking lesser evils. The woman letting her spare room to cover the mortgage pales beside the industrialized slum. But these are both facets of the same structural problem. Artificially constrained and cartelized real estate creates the condition for high market prices. The elderly fixed-income land lady can stake her very tiny claim or withhold it without meaningfully impacting the overall system. She is simply profiting off the cheaply developed real estate of the prior generation, while her college-aged tenant is paying a generational tax for arriving too late to the party.

That being said the whole system of for profit housing needs to be burned down and replaced with housing allocation based on planning and need.

The trick is in striding through that middle period where landladies are held up as the iconic victims of a ruthless Stalin-esque repatriation of private real estate.