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When AirBNB first arrived, I think we thought it would be a tool to let people rent a spare room in their house short term to travelers, with a built in system for reviews and reputation building to ensure that it's safe for both parties.
Turns out it's a platform that enables wannabe real estate moguls to buy up housing and convert it into unlicensed hotels for a tidy profit.
People extorting money due to the finite nature of land, for the sole reason of having been born with better access to capital.
It's just making money, due to having money. They didn't invent anything, they didnt discover and invest in an emerging company. They didn't do anything innovative or clever. Anyone born to wealth could have done it. Which is why those are, by far and away, the vast majority of landlords.
Even a Conservative, union busting aristocrat like Churchill knew how bad landlordism was and landlords have been hated throughout all of human history. It's only the current neoliberal plague who've attempted to moralise it with rich people worship and bootstrap paradoxes.
Needs socialised and subsidized; food, water, shelter, healthcare for example
Wants, not socialised
An example?
landlords are an unfortunate product of a system that has made it impossible for a normal person to buy a place to live or at least settle on unoccupied land.
you can choose not to be a landlord for ethical reasons, but they will exist as long as people have to rent.
My parents rent out a room to a traveling nurse since my brothers and I moved out, the space was just going to waste. I'm not positive on what she pays, but I think it's around $500.
My parents and grandparents own rent houses. They're active property managers. Most fixes they do themselves. My summers growing up were working on them.
I think the difference between what they do and the corporate owned apartment I'm staying in is the "personal touch" (for lack of a better term). When the owners have never even seen the property, they see renters as numbers on paper instead of people.
I work in real estate, but I don't hate landlords or rent. I hate the idea that landlording is a job somehow.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of landlords.
My landlord is an old lady who owns a series of apartment complexes. I assume she is quite wealthy, but the reason I don't take issue with the situation is because she keeps up the property instead of paying a property management firm to do it. She also isn't hoarding complexes or single family homes, she owns a couple, and managing a couple of complexes with a few people under you is a full time job.
The other kind is the people I work with. Fuck them. The property owners we work with are billionaires. They own hundreds or thousands of complexes and god knows how many single family homes. They also don't do anything. They buy a complex from a builder, then they pay a property management firm to run it. All they're doing is skimming excess rent in exchange for assuming the liability of owning the complex. Except they're not even doing that, because everything is insured.
The first kind of people are wealthy, yes, but they work for a living. The second kind do not actually do anything. If we killed them all tomorrow and gave the complexes they own to property management firms or individual managers, nothing would change.