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this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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A landlord is anyone that owns a property, and rents it out, whether it's commercial or residential, short-term, long-term, or even leasing land to hunters.
Landlords aren't a problem per se. Think, for instance, of student housing. When I moved to go to school, I needed a place to stay, but I didn't intend to live there for a long period of time. It would have been entirely unreasonable to buy a house or condo in order to go to school. I couldn't stay at home, because my parents lived a long way away from any university. (Dorms are utter hell, as are co-ops. I've only ever had one roommate that wasn't a complete and utter bastard.) You have a number of people who have the expectation in their career that they're going to be moving from city to city frequently, or will need to be working on-site for a period of months; it's not reasonable to expect them to buy either.
Then there are businesses. Most businesses don't want to buy, and can't afford to do so. Commercial real estate is it's own mess.
Taxing landlords won't solve the problem; landlords simply raise rents to achieve the same income. Preventing landlords from incorporating--so that they're personally liable for everything--might help. But it would also limit the ability to build new housing, since corporations have more access to capital than individuals. (Which makes sense; a bank that would loan me $5M to build a small housing complex would be likely to lose $5M.) Limiting ownership--so a person could only own or have an interest in X number of properties--might help, but would be challenging for Management companies are def. part of the problem in many cases, but are also a solution to handing maintenance issues that a single person might not be able to reasonably resolve.
Government ownership of property is nice in theory, but I've seen just how badly gov't mismanaged public housing in Chicago. It was horrific. There's very little way to directly hold a gov't accountable, short of armed revolution.
I don't think that it's the simple problem that classical Marxists insist it is. It's a problem for sure. I just don't think that there's an easy solution that doesn't cause a lot of unintended problems.
The real problem with government housing in the US specifically stems from our worship of billionaires, which requires us to demonize the poor. If a rich man is selfmade due to his virtues then poor people must lack virtue. That worldview implies that no amount of help will redeem the poor. Thus safety net programs are half-assed at best, and cut to bare bones or cut entirely at the worst.
The narrative that government-run programs are useless just does not hold up to the evidence. Even the housing program you mentioned is an improvement over nothing. But take a look at some of our programs and imagine the horror of a private alternative: US Postal service (I can send a letter to the smallest town in Alaska with a single stamp), rural electricity, roads (my God could you imagine a private road system), public school. You need to remember that the alternative to any flawed government program is NOTHING.
The best alternative to a flawed government program is nothing, it can get far worse than that
The best alternative to government housing is no housing? Landlords run at market rate and that keeps a lot of people out, so for them that's no housing.
That's the worse than nothing option, because it also invites gentrification to the area, which drives up prices of everything else nearby. So now not only can people not afford a place to live, they also can't even afford some food to eat, and are forced to migrate somewhere else. This is how you end up with homeless encampments.