[mevile]

> A company buying thousands of homes and then milking workers through rent for decades seems unethical.

Providing homes for rent is a service provided to people that they can pay for if they want to make use of it. An economic transaction involves an exchange for money. It is not milking someone. Is a grocery store milking you for food you buy?

A house has value. The people who built it had to feed themselves and their families. Land has value. It is not free. I have to pay expensive annual property taxes to maintain ownership. The services a bank provides are not free. Living expenses are a real thing and even if you can't afford it then someone else is going to have to pay for your housing.

[MrBuddyCasino]

The difference is that housing is a market where you can't increase supply much, because of location. This makes it an accelerator of inequality, unfairness and hereditary wealth. Also, regulatory capture.

[lotsofpulp]

We can increase supply by a lot in most places, just not single family homes with garages.

[MrBuddyCasino]

Theoretically, it could be done. Practically, home ownership makes everyone a Nimby, pulling up the ladder for everyone who doesn't.

[pytester]

>Land has value. It is not free.

And if you derive any rental income from the land value whatsoever, you are milking money from something valuable you did not create and did not make valuable. It's a purely parasitic form of value extraction from something that isn't free.

This is why the value of land improvements (e.g. having a nice house) should be untaxed, separated from the value of the land while the rental value of the land should be taxed at 100%.

And, until we do do that, we shouldn't pretend that rent isn't largely (i.e. ~60%) parasitic value extraction.

[mevile]

LVT seems like a positive change, I agree.

[TomMckenny]

>Land has value

Then consider the "value" of an empty lot, the archetype of land in itself. Its _price_ is based solely on the the _value_ that those near it produce. A high productivity region increases the value of neighboring empty lots. The lots themselves have produced nothing and whatever price they command is solely a drain on the productive part of the economy.

>Is a grocery store milking you for food you buy?

Value added by building or improving a resource like food or a structure is fundamentally different and obviously needs to be compensated and encouraged. But profit from an unchanged property is entirely a zero-sum gain moving wealth from productive parts of an economy to unproductive.