My one question with this is, what do you do for multi-unit apartments and such that aren’t condos? Yes, it’s corporate-owned. Yes, that has its own slime that needs to be cleaned up. But it’s also a reasonable way to increase housing density (meaning more housing and, if done correctly, less reliance on cars). Housing rentals do have their place in the world, especially when people only plan on living somewhere for a few years (college students, military, medium-term jobs)
How do you free up the housing market from landlords and investors while not screwing things up for people who would actually be better off renting?
simply decommodify housing, either by force or with aggressive taxation that makes it effectively poison to try to collect houses like these leeches do. once all the extra houses become poison, the government buys them for a reasonable price.
reasonable for the people, btw, not for the owners. then you provide affordable housing that pretty much acts as a rent, except instead of pouring money into the bank account of a random fuckwit you pay a little extra tax for it.
because it’s super affordable and always available, losing your home is now no longer a big concern. imagine the kind of power this gives people in the workforce alone. let alone general public health and mental stability.
you could have it as rent-taxes as long as you stay, where you can move out whenever, move in to another government housing or maybe buy your own and move there. or you could have the option to rent-until-you-own, where you pay taxes to live in a house until you completely pay it off, and then it’s yours, so long as you don’t own another home. basically like mortgage/credit but without banks and much cheaper installments and overall price.
Ehhh… Your first word was “simply” and that was followed by a 4-paragraph paradigm so different from what we have it’s bound to open many more cans of worms. I’m not sure it’ll be that simple
I’m sorry, we were knee deep in a situation already completely different than what we have and then you asked what about the benefit of renting. this is only one step away from what we were saying before. we already established that taxes should make owning homes untenable. next step is the government buying those extra homes and making them available for rent.
