• pachrist@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Seems like there’s a lack of understanding in this thread.

    Someone who owns a duplex and rents half is not a problem. My barber, who moved to be closer to sick, aging parents, but did not sell their house in Asheville, because they want to retire there and won’t be able to afford that if they sell now, is not a problem.

    Corporations are the problem. They’re buying up hundreds of thousands of properties, and why not? To a greedy corporation that only cares about money, it makes sense. If you sell a house, you make money once. If you rent a house, you have a subscription model and a revenue stream. Adobe did it with Photoshop. HP wants to do it with printers. Greedy Bastard Inc. wants to do it with housing.

    Legislate big business out of housing. It’s the only way to fix it.

    • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      It’s not a lack of understanding, it’s just that you’re omitting another huge group that is the other half of the corporation problem and also involves private landlords.

      The person who owns a duplex and lives in one of the two units is not a problem. A business owner with a taxpayer above their storefront is not a problem.

      But the large group of private landlords that buy up single family homes with the sole intention of turning them into forever-rentals are a huge problem and a much larger group than the niche private landlords you mentioned. These people don’t get a pass for doing the exact same things the corporations are doing but on a smaller scale. These people live in their own single family homes, which are financed by denying other people the chance to buy their own by removing them from the housing market and turning them into price-gauging forever-rentals.