[danaris]

Landlords do not offer a service.

They hoard housing, making it scarce, thus forcing others to rent it from them if they want to be housed.

If we outlawed the practice, landlords would have to sell their properties, significantly increasing the number of residential units on the market, and thus reducing the price and making it much more likely that someone living paycheck to paycheck would be able to afford a mortgage on one.

None of the work involved in maintaining a property requires that the person (or company) doing so be the property's owner. It would still be perfectly reasonable for an apartment building, as a co-op, to hire a single management company to handle cleaning, maintenance, etc—somewhat similarly to how some HOAs hire a company to do landscaping for all their residents. And, yes, potentially subject to inefficiency and corruption, but we live in an imperfect world, and it's not like apartment maintenance is a perfect bastion of competence and altruism today.

[thegrimmest]

Housing doesn't just grow on trees. It's capital-intensive to produce. Capital that needs to see a return on investment, since it doesn't exist in a vacuum. There are a certain class of people that simply cannot be relied on to pay a mortgage. These people still demand housing, so are served by the renters market. If you force every landlord to sell their housing, you're basically punishing them for investing. Since your heavy-handed regulation has now scared off all the capital from housing, how will you build new houses?

[notch656a]

I'm not a fan of eliminating landlords, but I can easily and trivially see a system how housing is built and provided without landlords or mortgage providers. The old Latin American way: you buy each brick when you can afford it. Unfortunately the imbeciles in government would have an aneurism: "NOO!!! you can't just buy bricks and stack them without a special stamp on a piece of paper!!!! How else can I buy my next new Prius without your tax money?"

I lived for months out of a tent, and virtually the only reason I don't now is because of the retarded CPS / child abuse regulations in US let petty bureaucrats arbitrarily decide what adequate housing is. The US has insane building codes and zoning regulations that make housing way less affordable than it could be to build with a working man's cash.

[thegrimmest]

Even in the Latin American way, surely there are people who can afford more than one house, and decide to rent out the surplus? But I agree that regulatory overhead in housing construction is very high, and this contributes to the cost of housing.

The favelas in Latin America, whose property are they actually built on?

[notch656a]

>Even in the Latin American way, surely there are people who can afford more than one house, and decide to rent out the surplus?

Sure, I don't really have a problem with landlords benefitting from investing into a house and renting it. I'm kind of with Adam Smith on the problems of rent-seeking of the value of the raw land, but I'm not sure a better system than private property can be found for dealing with that.

> The favelas in Latin America, whose property are they actually built on?

Maybe somebody elses, maybe nobody's, maybe their own? I have no idea. If you aren't discriminating you can build a house brick by brick anywhere until someone with guns or a sledgehammer makes you stop, be it a land owner, gangster, government, whoever. I'd be interested in knowing myself.