[nicoburns]

Right, but people don't need to be making money out of that. I think you could set the tax rates so that people basically break even (make a small profit) from renting a house out, and they actually lose money if they hold on to a house they're not renting out (with some carefully worded time-limited exceptions for houses under renovation). That would drive down house prices sharpish!

You could also allow the state to step in as owners of rental housing where private landlords aren't making enough rental houses available. And if the state actually built houses for rental you likely wouldn't need as harsh taxation because the rental prices would drop purely through the increased supply.

[crazygringo]

Of course people need to be making money off it.

Nobody would ever rent to tenants if there weren't profit in it. Take away the profit and all the tenants who need to rent are totally out of luck because nobody has any reason to rent to them. :(

Same as mortgages wouldn't exist if banks didn't make a profit off them.

[danaris]

> Take away the profit and everybody who needs to rent is out of luck.

How does that follow?

Take the situation as it exists today—X amount of "housing units" exist, and Y of those "housing units" are owned by investors as rental properties.

Now, change the situation so that it becomes unprofitable to own properties you are not occupying. All X of those housing units still exist. They won't be destroyed (well, maybe a few will, but not enough to seriously change the calculations), and if it's not profitable to rent them, it's going to be even less profitable to hang onto them sitting empty.

What happens in that scenario? Well, they should be sold.

Who would they be sold to? People who need a place to live (because no one's going to be buying them as investment or rental properties anymore).

How much are they going to be sold for? The amount these people are willing and able to pay. Why would they be sold for significantly more than they would be rented out for before? Sure, some current owners would be in denial and unwilling to accept that they'd lose a bunch of money on it (or maybe, as nicoburns suggests, there would be some kind of one-time bailout/incentive/whatever to make sure that the current owners would sell, and wouldn't lose their shirts). But while it would certainly change the economics of the situation somewhat from what they are today, and it would take our society a few years to reorganize around it, ultimately, I don't believe removing the middleman landlord class from the equation would harm the people who are currently renting in the long term. Indeed, I think it would benefit them, because instead of being in a situation where they're basically guaranteed to have a significant portion of their earnings siphoned off purely to be allowed to have a place to exist, they would be building up equity in something through those payments...and once they finished paying the purchase price, they would own the place, no longer have to make payments, and be able to sell it on when they decided it was time to move.

[crazygringo]

> What happens in that scenario? Well, they should be sold.

Exactly. They'll be sold to people who will live in them, and they won't be rented anymore.

So if you want to move to a city for two years for a temporary job contract and rent a house... you literally can't. Because nobody will rent to you, because all the houses are occupied by owners living in them. Which is a disaster for rental demand.

Remember that a lot of people want to rent. They prefer to rent instead of buy, for various reasons from flexibility to it just making more financial sense for various reasons.

This is why if you take away the profit from renting, people who want to rent will be out of luck.

[danaris]

> So if you want to move to a city for two years for a temporary job contract and rent a house... you literally can't.

That still doesn't follow.

The total amount of housing stock will not change, and nor will the total amount of people needing housing of whatever type (besides some movement on the margins of both).

There is no reason to believe that, in an environment where renting is no longer a viable option, everyone will just shrug their shoulders and say, "Well, I guess all of this is necessarily going to be long-term purchase property, handled exactly the same way we handled homeownership before this change—big closing costs and all."

Yes, obviously, by definition, if renting is not an option, people who want to rent will be out of luck—but that doesn't mean that the people who want to rent today would have no viable options for housing after such a change took place. I don't know exactly what the solution would look like, because it would depend heavily on what specific changes we made that made renting properties out no longer viable, but it's really not that hard to imagine them.

[crazygringo]

> I don't know exactly what the solution would look like

And that's exactly the problem. If you're not proposing a solution for how to continue providing rentals to the people who need them, then you're not proposing any workable solution at all.

Your solution was "convert it all to owner-occupied housing" and I was pointing out that doesn't work because it ignores the needs of renters.

[danaris]

I explicitly said I don't know what the solution would look like because the change proposed is generic.

Give me a specific proposal for how to break the rentier economy, and I can probably give you a specific proposal for how to solve the problems it raises.

[nicoburns]

> This is why if you take away the profit from renting, people who want to rent will be out of luck.

Or you have social (government owned) rental housing.

[crazygringo]

Ugh, I definitely wouldn't want that. Have you seen the state of government-owned housing projects?

I want landlords who are incentivized to keep their properties well-maintained and configured for what the rental market wants in terms of both functionality and aesthetic taste.

For-profit landlords do a vastly better job at meeting market demand than a government bureaucracy. Which is why, of course, we're a capitalist economy rather than a socialist command economy.

Government-owned rental housing sounds like a nightmare. The same nightmare as nationalizing industry in general.

[danaris]

> For-profit landlords do a vastly better job at meeting market demand than a government bureaucracy.

Do you actually have evidence of this? Or is your only concept of "government-owned housing" racially-segregated ghettos called things like "The Projects"?

Because every renter I know rents from a for-profit landlord, and almost every single one of them has had massive problems with one landlord or another screwing them over either by neglect or by active malice. When there are more people looking for housing than there are housing units on the market—hey, look, another problem caused by allowing excessive numbers of vacant investment properties—all the landlords have to do is make sure the cockroaches don't scuttle by right in front of your face before you've signed the lease.

If the government is failing to properly maintain its rental properties, you have a recourse: the government legally answers to the people, which for-profit landlords do not, and if the problems are serious enough, you can vote in local government officials who will do something about it.

[SketchySeaBeast]

What stops the landlord from raising the rent? All the landlords will be under the same pressure, so rent should rise universally.

[jfghi]

They do that anyways.