This would make sense to me. Why are some businesses being shut down and have to deal with income losses and others like landlords can keep going and demand their income? This seems fundamentally unfair to me.
Ah, but comrade, paying rent itself is inherently unfair. It allows for profit off merely having bought something sooner than another had a chance to. If the rent stops now, why should the rent start back up?
My goodness, people here must really not have any experience either renting or owning. As a new homeowner, it is obvious what I used to be paying for -- someone to fix my living space any time something broke without charge and someone to maintain my building and my outdoor areas. It turns out that these things are actual work...
Not to mention the financial risks, liability, having to handle problatic tenants, etc. Ironically, a lot of landlords are those trying to live the American dream. They're people that are working their ass off trying to be upwardly mobile. And while I understand that even they often have privlages not afforded to the lowest income brackets, they also aren't the 1% or aristocrats of the French revolution. The virtiole against billionaires has filtered down to them pretty unfairly. ...and tte real issues we have over what parameters of the power law distribution of wealth should be tolerated have a much lower impact on the income bracket of lanlords than they do on the top 0.01%
One to look at rent is that it's like the old joke about prostitution: you don't pay for the sex, you pay for them to leave afterwards.
Rent gives you greater location flexibility and less commitment to a specific place and building. You don't have to maintain it yourself, and you are freed from the mental load of having to do long-term planning around it at all. Not that it's necessarily good for the surrounding community, but to some degree, renting gives you the luxury of "driving it like you stole it" and that's a real value for some people.
I own my house. When plumbers dumped water in the basement and destroyed a floor, that was my problem. Renters pay for that kind of stuff to be someone else's problem.
I can see the argument about flexibility, but it doesn't really seem to mesh up with the skyrocketing demand for rental properties in urban areas.
On the other hand, I'm not sure why the service of removing risk from home ownership is good (or why it couldn't be separated into ownership and property management.) In the paradigm you're proposing, the renter wants to be insulated from the risk of property damage or adverse effects on the home they purchased. And the price they're willing to pay for this is... 100% of the equity of the place they live in?
This isn't all that different then how a person chooses to work for a company rather than run a company themselves.
People often dread working for others, but still do it because the risk and difficulties of running a business themselves aren't worth the ability to easily change jobs/roles/location that working for someone else allows.
If you own a house or business, if something goes wrong, you have to fix it, or sell the asset so it's not your problem anymore. If you rent/work for someone else you simply move/work somewhere else.
Anyone who wants to buy a rental house is free to do so. Just make an unsolicited purchase offer to the landlord for more than the net present value of all expected future rental income. Most landlords are willing to sell their properties, even when they're not currently listed on the market.
People who would rather buy houses than rent should feel free to do so. No landlord is forcing someone to rent their property.
It is often the case that renting is quite a bit cheaper and always the case that it's more flexible to do so, which is why a lot of people choose to rent instead of buying. Society benefits when people who wish to rent housing have housing available for lease.
It's certainly more feasible to rent if you don't have the money to buy a house, which is why every single renter i know is doing do. I'm just not sure why this is necessary or a valuable economic innovation that justifies the rent paid.
Rentals are a useful innovation because the transaction is beneficial for both parties.
The leasor turns their large investment into a stream of payments, and the leasee turns their stream of payments into use of a large investment without having to make such an investment and without needing to have the capability to make that investment.
Avoiding making a large investment in property makes it easier for the leasee to move if needed, since there aren't significant costs to unwind a lease like there are to unwinding property ownership.
You're not sure why it's a valuable economic innovation that people who don't have the money to buy a house can rent one? What alternative are you suggesting, that they should get a house for free?
But the price of buying a home would be a lot lower if there was no rent (or other ways to own a home you don't live in). There are more homes than there are people.
Just about every 4-plex and apartment building in the world wouldn't exist if there was no rent to pay for their construction.
(On a much more minor note, there are not more housing units (about 140M) than people (about 335M) in the US and probably not in the world; though that's literally what you claimed, it's probably not what you really meant to claim. Taking the most charitable re-interpretation of your claim: there are slightly more housing units than households (about 140M vs about 130M) in the US. See above about the prediction that many of these housing units likely not existing [or continuing to be offered/maintained] if rent were outlawed.)
The fact that the people who would rather buy them lack the available resources to do so on their own, putting aside any economies of scale benefits from either developers or their demand.
Preferring a better option doesn't mean much unfortunately. To go with a variant on a crass old joke "I would rather be paid billions to sleep with an endless line of beautiful women than work retail but they aren't hiring for that position unfortunately."
The opportunity cost of the downpayment (and also the fact that lots of people wouldn't have the money for a down payment anyway). Generally the returns from property investing are relatively low compared to other investments.
Things like property taxes and maintenance are fixed costs for property owners. Those can eat up 50% or more of the rental income. So if renters aren't paying, even property owners who don't have a mortgage have high fixed costs that they have to pay.
Because virii and reality don't give a damn about human sense or fairness fairness compared to what can and does work. "Making things fair" and forcing non-hazardous businesses to close as well even if they can teleoperate would be counterproductive.
The rents are given locked in periods which change vs the potential real swing in value. It is a "futures contract" sort of situation. If sales at a location increase tenfold over others of comparable nichw and expenses rent raising relative value compared to comparably priced competitors then the landlord cannot instantly raise rent for the contract period. They effectively got stuck renting "undervalued". This situation is a reverse of sorts - the income is down but the price is locked in so the retailers are paying for overvalued rent.
This leads to a bit of rent hardball as the retailers can "call their bluff" as they know if they were evicted they could not be replaced with anyone willing to pay the old value and try to force concessions.
I wonder how many people asked that during the World Wars? Why do they have to suffer because some rich assholes decided they need every industry to support the war.