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Comment by dvh | Hacker News Reader

You build apartment and sell it to people for profit.

No, profit is icky and illegal apparently.

Profiting from housing, yes, is not something I personally consider moral. But also, I believe that we don't need to meet my fairly radical moral stance to make housing more affordable and attainable for all.

We can make incremental progress here by just tweaking incentives. We can go further by reducing profits. It's not some binary all or nothing affair.

Well then, feel free to buy a house and sell it at cost. Don't worry about all that money you put into the home over the years to improve or maintain it, either.

Oh, and to add to the utter inanity of what you're proposing, make sure that you sell it at your purchase cost and not the 200%ish extra that they tack on to a 30 year loan at 4% interest.

Go ahead. Chalk it up to a personal experiment and let us know how it turns out in 30 years.

Improving and maintaining a house is "at cost".

And I've done what you describe. I was a landlord for a decade.

I paid back each of my tenants all the profit I made from them, thousands and thousands of dollars per tenant. Adjusted upwards by the amount the property had appreciated.

I now rent in a sliding scale, capped at the cost of the unit.

Granted, it's only been ten years, not the thirty you suggest, but it's worked out great. Nearly every tenant has used their time with me to build a nest egg or savings that enabled them to move into a house they owned.

You could also just donate to charity, the effect might be similar (or even stronger, since it would go to needier people). By the way, this is all very nice of you but it is off-putting how you seem to want to impose forced charity on every other landlord.

When most people are talking about home ownership, we're not talking about being someone else's landlord. We're talking about living in a place until we move, and then selling that property.

You are discussing an entirely different issue.

I don’t like landlords (such as those in SV) collecting so much of the value, but a more productive solution here is minimal zoning, a high land value tax (with other taxes lower), and letting people do what they want with their property, allowing some tragedy of the commons with respect to traffic and population.

This also means deadbeat tenants get kicked out, but I think that is intrinsically a good thing. Occupying somebody else’s home and not moving someplace you can afford is just immoral.

Most types of profit are immoral. Providing housing is at least genuinely clearly useful.

Manipulating people to buy stuff they don't need (advertising, marketing, hollywood) is immoral in so many ways. Weapons are very questionable, massive markups on basic stuff (cosmetics) etc etc if you go on about 80% of our economy is actually immoral. Even foods which are a basic good, are generally bottom dollar hollowed out poisons compared to what they could be if health was the primary concern. Don't get me started on the corruptions of profit to the medical process.

I don't know what your problem is about housing but it seems out of perspective if you're not going to campaign against profit from just about everything.

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