[joecot]

My alternative would be to establish a land trust to manage the apartment building. Then you can provide housing for 3 other families without also making a profit off of them. Here's an example of a Land Trust: https://www.sawmillclt.org/

The argument is often as you say, that Land Lords add value by giving housing where people couldn't otherwise afford to live. And this is undercut by two points:

1. The landlord isn't the essential part there. If the point is to provide housing without having to buy, that's easily done with land trusts and co-ops. The only downside is that there isn't a Landlord to make a profit, but it's better for society as a whole.

2. If landlords didn't buy up properties for the purposes of turning around and renting them, the property values would be lower because there wouldn't be as much demand on the market. Then a decent portion of the people you're talking about not being able to afford to live there ... would be able to afford to live there.

[imtringued]

>2. If landlords didn't buy up properties for the purposes of turning around and renting them, the property values would be lower because there wouldn't be as much demand on the market.

Why would there be less demand on the market? What you are saying is that without landlords there is an absence of properties that people want to live in. How else does the land lord increase demand? By buying units that he never intends to rent out? That type of owner is no longer a landlord, merely an investor.

>Then a decent portion of the people you're talking about not being able to afford to live there ... would be able to afford to live there.

They would be able to afford to live there because nobody else wants to live there? What? How is that supposed to be a good thing?

I honestly can't grasp the hate of landlords. It literally makes zero sense. Rent seeking is bad but all land owners engage in it. Landlords have at least some incentive to make scarce land available to as much people as possible. All the other types of owners would rather make as little land available to as few people as possible. That is truly perverse and should be punished with a land value tax (the landlord would have to pay it as well but he doesn't care, as he would still make money off of the improvement of the land, not the land itself).

[alert0]

I appreciate the reply, I hadn't seen these before and I'll do some more research on them.

My initial reaction is how does this address the issue of developing more units in dense urban environments? For example, if we convert all multi family dwellings in LA to CLTs. Housing is more affordable and no residents are being displaced. Now more people want to move to LA. Who builds housing for them?

They would be required for compete over an extremely limited number of SFHs. Unless the CLTs had a provision that every Nth year, they would be torn down and redeveloped for greater density, this sounds like it would cause a city to completely stagnate. That Nth year clause would really go against the non-displacement goal. It could be sustainable if a city had zero growth, but for desirable metro areas that are mostly developed, that is not the case.

Market rents cause healthy turn over. There are other ways to address affordability, such as addressing wage growth, removing density restrictions, or expanding Section 8. Non-profit landlords would just further distort the system by not addressing systemic needs that require capital.

[AlexTWithBeard]

> with land trusts and co-ops

The hardest part with this - as with many other similarly noble undertakings - is to find a person who's willing to do all the job of setting things up and then step aside.

As we empirically see, there are not many people like that, otherwise this country would be full of land trusts.

[joecot]

Many of the land trusts form because the tenants get so pissed at their landlord that they make their landlord's life miserable, until the landlord gives up and sells the building to them for a land trust. Peace is a lie.

[AlexTWithBeard]

Does the landlord sell the property at market price?