A Boring Dystopia

I think this is the disconnect.

We have legitimate rental use cases. During college, owning a house would have made little sense since I had no idea where my life would take me. If someone is on an overseas assignment for 3 months, buying a house would be nuts.

On the other hand, out of state companies have bought every house in my neighborhood that has come up for sale over the past 5 years. The tenants I have talked to are there not because their arrangements should be temporary, but because all housing stock is purchased by companies.

So yes, there should be some medium-term rental for certain cases between days to a couple years long. It should not however smother even the possibility of home ownership for people with longer term plans.

Great questions!

1. Yep, you can sell it* to someone else. Or it'll just sit there and then I would advocate for some kind of common sense squatters law to take effect.

2. Short answer: See 1; long answer: you could find somewhere run by e.g. a housing co-op, or a (long-stay) hotel, or a property management company* and stay there.

3. Yes I'd be fine with that, caveats:

   • You are also benefitting from someone tending to the house while you're gone, so I'd expect the amount to be commensurate with that*.
   • You're not going on holiday to another one of many other properties you own which you also rent out when you're not in them.

Note: All my answers involve exchanging some kind of value (indicated by *) for money, and that's my key point. If you're actually contributing something then I have no problem with that. But that's not what being a landlord is. A few ways this is evident:

1. We already have words for all the jobs: Architect, building super, cleaner, designer, engineer, landscaper, manager, plumber. These are useful skills, people should get paid for them, but:
2. A landlord is different. They make money by rent seeking, per Wikipedia: "the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth". They don't do anything except own a piece of paper (and the blessing of our current laws) which says they can do that.

Now, the water can get muddied when people are both landlords and do the other jobs (e.g. cleaning), but it's pretty easy to think of other examples of this:

I also skim money out of the register, but I also get paid to work in the store. In both cases (rent seeking and skimming) I'm making money, but not actually adding any value.

Or, to my original example: Scalping tickets. I'm not putting on the show, I'm not the talent, or involved with the venue, I'm not printing or shipping the tickets. I'm not doing anything except gaming the system to make money.

Just like robbing a bank, just like ponzi schemes, and just like Sam Bankman-Fried: Gaining money, not adding value (aka creating wealth).

The only difference is we decided (as a society) some are legal, and some are illegal, and I have a good idea why (see Figure 1.).