America without Landlords: A more in-depth discussion. [View all]

[True Blue Door]

In an earlier post, I raised the general theoretical question of what would happen if owners of real estate could only buy or sell (or use it themselves) rather than renting out and being landlords. The fact of how horrifyingly one-sided, exploitive, and artificially price-inflated tenant/landlord business relationships tend to be is painfully obvious, and the massive power imbalance between tenants and landlords (even in areas with relatively strong tenant activism) is something our society has yet to address on a fundamental level.

So I would like to summarize the main objections that have been raised to banning landlordism in the very large number of comments the original post received. Although I answered a number of them, they were repeated so often that it became a chore to answer the same objections over and over, so here is a summary that everyone can consult and comment further on:

1. Big Gubmint!

Don't give a shit. I'm a liberal progressive, and I believe the government's job is to manage the economy for the benefit of society as a whole - which is what it either has been doing or supposed to have been doing since 1933.

If you are against the basic concept of the government regulating business, your opinions are beyond the scope of the topic, and completely outside my interest. If you're against the objective of the idea (greater wealth equality through government policy), then your opinion of whether the idea achieves that objective obviously involves a conflict of interest.

2. Would harm renters.

As explained in the original post, if the only two ways for profit-driven owners to make a profit are using the locations themselves or selling, most would find it more convenient to sell. This would reduce the market price of the real estate considerably, stabilizing only after the property has distributed widely enough that it's primarily being used by the owners (whether for habitation or business) rather than by very wealthy individuals or corporations whose sole function is to passively own and extort rent from users. With a drastically reduced price, far more people who were once forced to rent could afford to buy.

For the rest, we can very easily imagine any number of arrangements whereby groups pool resources, or else laws are changed to allow smaller increments of purchase. But these are details that should be left to specific legislation, and are not realistic objections to the fundamental concept of eliminating rental arrangements. The fact is that you can nitpick and use "Yeah, well, what about such-and-such a special case?!" arguments against laws that already exist and already work just fine.

But here's the most crucial fact: The status quo grievously harms renters. The very existence of the renter/landlord business arrangement - which is typically not voluntary on the part of the renter, but extorted by their circumstances and the market control exerted by current owners - harms renters. The status quo hurts renters, and is bleeding them dry. Bleeding the entire American middle class dry. The problem is vast and drastic, and here is one possible element of a solution to it.

You can throw in just about any mitigation to specific legislation to deal with timing, gradualism, increments, and other fine policy details, but fundamentally you cannot show why such a system - once fully implemented, with rational mechanisms put in place to address obvious concerns - is a bad idea. Objections become circular, saying that we cannot change because everything is already built around the current system, forgetting that the current system wasn't always the current system either. We have choices to make, and a fact to confront that the status quo is deeply harming us.


3. Would harm current homeowners.

There are a vast panoply of methods we can envision in legislation to deal with that - grandfather clauses, tax credit mitigations of losses, etc. This is, again, a question for specific legislation and not the fundamental idea. Because once the system is in place, and all the costs of transition are dealt with one way or another, there would be far more homeowners (although some would merely own apartments or even single rooms), keeping far more of their income because it's not being extorted by landlords. That is a good end in itself to seek, so the question is merely can legislation be designed that transitions to that without wreaking havoc?

The answer is obviously yes, if you believe in FDR-style liberal progressive democracy. The changes his administration wrought were far more drastic than this one, since this only concerns one element of one industry, and the parasitic speculative financial organizations that use it to engage in stock market fraud. So, if we are not so brainwashed by decades of conservative dogma into thinking a government can't handle something like this, what's the problem other than fear of change?

4. Would harm local tax revenues based on property value.

People buy property based on their ability to buy it, and that doesn't change just because prices fall. Usually they will buy exactly what they can afford, and if prices fall, they can afford a bigger house. But the total value of the house that person or family buys is the same because their resources to buy it are the same, so they pay the same in property taxes that they did before.

It's fair to say that the money would move around geographically, but that already happens: Some neighborhoods go down, some rise up. Some are blighted, some are gentrified, some cruise along just fine. All economic change does that. And if the argument against a positive change - an increase in general prosperity - is that it disrupts some local economies, that's a completely moot objection. Disruption caused by increasing prosperity is a good problem to have, and one that solves itself by people's ability to contribute to their communities and attract or start businesses increasing.

There is also the fact that people typically take better care of property when it's their own, and communities in general when they feel invested rather than feeling like a second-class citizen because they're not a land-owner.

This country started out being only of, by, and for white land-owning males. We've made a lot of progress on the white and male parts of that exclusionary legacy, but people who don't own real estate are still treated like peasants, extorted, and ignored by politicians. It's time to change that.