[ltbarcly3]

Lol, what? Here is how gentrification works:

Nobody gets removed, they just have to leave. It's a subtle distinction but that's how it happens. Poor people don't own anything. Their furniture is mostly stacks of junk that is so bad that it would be hard or impossible to get someone to accept it for free (this is very nearly a tautology, since the poor person got this furniture for free to begin with, and it's was so bad when they got it that nobody else would give anything for it). They rent. At some point property values are high enough the landlord (or his heir) decides to sell. At the end of the lease, the property is no longer for rent. That's the end of it. However, keep in mind that poor people tend to move every few years regardless. They are right on the edge of falling out of the population of working people who are self sufficient, so it is very common that they end up being evicted, abusing drugs or alcohol (even if just for awhile), or just having too many kids to be able to afford childcare so they can keep working to support themselves. Properties no longer being for rent in some neighborhood has almost no effect on any given poor person who lived in that neighborhood as they are one step above transient anyway.

This isn't an apology, it's just a more accurate description of what happens, I've seen it first hand from the low prestige side of things when I was young.

[solar-ice]

Ehh. Being kicked out of your home is being removed, even if it's perfectly legal. Fixed-term rental contracts are nearly entirely immoral imo.

And while an accurate depiction of how this affects the people who were barely hanging on in the first place, there is a later step, where people who /have/ been renting all their lives in one area find themselves unable to continue to pay rent. You're not necessarily a homeowner if you're not at constant risk of homelessness.

I've seen this while squatting; our neighbours were people who had lived in the same community for 70 years, and their option once the landlord had decided to tear the building down and replace it with "luxury apartments" was far away from everyone they had known all their lives. There were several similar stories in the area.

[ltbarcly3]

I think it's an interesting moral question: How much are you responsible for someone else's failure to plan ahead or foresee consequences? What are the consequences if we make you responsible for other people for their entire life just because you have some economic interaction with them?

I think if you make renting someone an apartment a lifelong obligation to provide them with housing at approximately that cost then only a fool would ever rent out an apartment. The supply of apartments to rent would go to approximately 0. One strange consequence of this would be that the price of housing would plummet as a result as all the landlords left the market. When you went to buy a condo, instead of competing with landlords and money launderers you would only be bidding against other people who want to live in the apartment. I saw this first hand at the GHI housing co-op in Maryland, buying a unit there was dramatically below market cost because they did not allow anyone to live in units apart from owners.

[solar-ice]

If we come at this from a perspective of "people deserve to have a home where they are safe", rather than from an economic perspective, the moral question is why on earth we decided to allow and protect private landlords who have an interest in exactly the opposite.

[ltbarcly3]

I completely agree with you that allowing private landlords is against our collective interests as a society. I think there would be details to work out but I would be very interested to see a city or state ban the renting of housing as an experiment.

As for thinking from an economic perspective, I think anything else is doomed to fail. Unless we think about how people will behave to maximize their own outcomes in some system we risk making things much worse (even if we do think it through we still risk making things much worse, but at least we will have more confidence that we are doing the right thing). Socialist states are a great example of this, they plow ahead on the moral high ground (at least in their moral system) and manage to make their citizens poorer.