[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.

[crazygringo]

> Do you actually have evidence of this?

Yes, it's a basic tenet of economics that market economies meet consumer demand more effectively than government command economies. The entire 20th century is your evidence.

And for all of your anecdotes of terrible landlord stories, I can share all the great experiences of me and my friends. But at the end of the day, you kind of get what you pay for. E.g. renting a $1,500/mo. 1-bedroom vs a $3,500 1-bedroom in NYC will result in vastly different experiences with quality of maintenance and how responsive your landlord is.

But at the end of the day you're basically arguing for government ownership of the economy (because why stop at rentals?), and I don't really know what to tell you, except thank goodness that's not the country we live in.

[nicoburns]

> Yes, it's a basic tenet of economics that market economies meet consumer demand more effectively than government command economies

It's a basic tenet of fairly extreme capitalist economics. A more balanced view would be that this is often the case but that it only really works when the market is competitive. And that it is hard for a market to be competitive when it's constrained by a limited resource (in this case, land in desirable locations).

As a counterexample to your tenet, municipal internet providers almost always provide better service and cheaper prices than private alternatives.