this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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I don't get it.. if someone works and invests in a property, they pay a significant amount of money to have and maintain that property. If someone can only afford to rent for a short term period of time, what then? Is the next step that the person spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a house supposed to just hand it over without selling it to a tenant? What is the alternative?
Put a limit on how many single family homes anyone can own. Especially corporations. They should honestly be banned from owning these homes at all. The housing market will adjust naturally without all these shitty big companies scooping up homes and making them inaccessible to buyers.
Individuals should also be limited on how many homes they can own if anything to prevent corporations from exploiting loopholes and having individual people "own" them instead. But also because it's just morally wrong to hoard property in the first place. I pay more in rent than I would on a mortgage but I can't afford the down payment for the very few homes that are even available within a reasonable distance from my job. Even if I could so many companies smatch them up over the asking price so people don't have a chance.
People like me that could financially afford the payments on their own homes are blocked by bullshit that was created solely to keep them perpetually renting. It's wrong. I shouldn't have to move to a whole new state or two hours away from my job because the same big company has bought up every house here. Not to mention a bunch of them recently got busted for illegally controlling the rent prices across multiple companies/properties using some kind of third party algorithm.
I don't think anyone should have to give up their property for free but if we're paying someone else's mortgage we should be getting more than a roof over our head.
As someone who was brokering mortgages during the housing boom this is exactly what happened. Landlords were usually just 1 or 2 extra properties, the odd person owned an apartment block, but it was all in personal names.
Once the corporations game started is when prices went nuts and havent stopped. Stop the corporations from owning rentals and this will all be solved. Personal liability is about 20 properties as far as the banks are willing to lend someone, corporations are unlimited if the numbers check out , which when you control and manipulate pricing, it always will.
If you limited house (single family residence) ownership to something like individuals, sole proprietorship, or partnerships, it would also remove liability protections which come with corporate structure, so it might make owning a large number of properties less attractive. That would be a good thing. But what would really drive housing prices down would be if houses were a public good.