A Boring Dystopia

Rental income is considered income, and taxed assuming reasonable tax brackets much higher than investment income (That is to say, caiptal-gains. Interest/Dividends are also taxed at the higher income rate)

The cost of maintaining a livable home, property taxes, insurance, property depreciation, and renter interactions eat into the supposed windfall that landlords make.

I'm not saying it doesn't suck sometimes and that certainly these formulas are out of whack in some situations, but there are no easy answers.

I'd much rather rent than own! It gives me a lot more freedom to move, i have less at risk and no stress that something might need fixing.

Stop being so obsessed about owning! In the end you won't take any of it to the grave anyway

You'd have to get rid of the concept of private property and that isn't going anywhere. Same with landlords.

You're not going to vote this out of the system.

Have you ever tried it? It's more work than you think.

Set some limits. Each person can own one primary residence and x number of secondary dwellings. Each additional dwelling is taxed at a higher rate than the one before.

People can still buy themselves a house and maybe another couple houses or condos for their family or investment.

But big landlords can't profitably buy up neighborhoods then crank up the rent. Or perhaps they can own them, but they're required to be non-profits and expenses and rents are highly controlled relative to income in the area.

It's a tough problem to solve though... Huge apartment buildings do have economies of scale that permit high density living.

And property owners who don't sell or develop their land at all because there's not enough incentive are a big problem in other parts of the world.

Folks, there's a difference between a slumlord and a decent landlord. I've owned a house for ten years now, and in addition to the mortgage and taxes and insurance I pay every month for the privelege, I've had to spend tens of thousands replacing the roof and doing other regular maintenance tasks. I'm actually about to dump thirty percent of the original purchase price into more deferred repairs and maintenance to get it back to a point where all the finished space is habitable again. Owning a house is expensive in ways that I did not fully understand until I bought mine, and decent property managers are taking care of all that for you, and if that's not a job I honestly don't know what is.

Slumlords and corporate landlords can fuck right the hell off, though.

What do families do, that only want or need to live in a place or area for like a year or so? Buy a house, pay thousands in closing costs and inspections, lose several thousand to realtors, and then have to go through the trouble of trying to sell the place a year later?

We very much need landlords. What's screwing everything up is corpos doing it as a business or individuals with like 20 homes instead of one or two. Renting a house is a viable need for some people and it would actually suck if it was an option that didn't exist at all.

Landphobia on my Lemmy? It's more likely than you think.