In a just society, these companies would be dissolved and its leadership imprisoned at least.
At least the corporate landlord isn't going to control the local planning process to block housing, like small landlords and homeowners residents do.
But to me, a corporation owning a home and renting it out is no worse than anybody else renting it out, and given that they likely are more rule-abiding and knowledgeable about the rules, it's often a big win.
The surest thing to strip down the number of landlords is to slow appreciation, when appreciation is sky-high even idiots doing everything wrong come out smelling like roses.
I think a strong thing to work on would be to reduce the "single rental LLC" trick that people use to separate the various properties
In this case, stopping or slowing this is actually pretty simple: Change the tax code which is currently overly favorable to real estate investors.
Specifically: No accelerated depreciation, stretch out the depreciation schedule to 40 years from 27.5, stop allowing 1031 exchanges, eliminate real estate step up tax basis on death, etc.
So the missing link is somehow proving the causality between "rents are high" and "3 companies own 19,000 rentals". That may seem obvious but could be very difficult to prove, especially as it may not be correct. Walmart owns 25% of the grocery business in the USA - does anyone really think grocery prices would go down if they divested? (It may still be better for society for them to do so, lowest price is not the only measurement, of course.)
First, most of these companies will hold large liability insurance protection.
But also, if someone sues and can prove negligence they can go further up the chain to the individual holding companies making the LLC shell game irrelevant.
The "best" might be to adjust property tax on a given description of dwelling unit such that it's pretty annoyingly high, but each family effectively gets one for free. Then corporations and multi-unit owners would pay that, but individuals wouldn't.
Prop 13 in CA would be much less of an issue if it excluded commercial real estate and only applied to "homesteads" owned and held by the resident owners.
I say this as someone who owned rental properties in an area that jacked up property taxes. Me and all the other landlords simply raised rent to compensate.
But if your property tax was 200%, and a home-owner's was 1%, things would change.
Now the argument about what the "minimal available housing" should be would come into play, because people who could not buy no matter what would now be homeless ...
I think we should remove carrots (the tax advantages at the federal level) instead of trying to penalize via harsher taxes.
That's incredibly, ridicously few.
I fucking _wish_ I could rent from corporate landlords. The few times I have they've been _miles_ better than the amateur landlords that own most of my city.
The fact that they do own 19,000 homes is indicative of appreciation being insane (and they're gambling on that, when it slows down they'll dump) OR they're stuck with them for whatever reason and trying to deal with it as best they can (banks in the 2000s crisis often did NOT rent the houses they foreclosed on, because it would cost them more than just leaving them empty).
Ergo, liberalise planning.
That would make land-lording into a low profit respectable profession and would drive slumlords out of business. The only way to profit would be to actually be good at it would be to manage homes well. Margins would come from that, not from property speculation (how trump made his money).
It would also create a titanic amount of tax revenue from the non-productive economy (land hoarding) which would mean that taxes could be reduced or even eliminated on the productive economy (e.g. income taxes).
Ownership has other advantages for society beyond that, there's a reason people say "drive it like a rental".
That being said, the last thing we need is more people in prison
But I'm guessing there's some other reason that you think this makes the world worse. Can you tell me how?
I have lived in rental housing far longer than I have owned a house, and my personal politics are such that I don't think that land should be private property. I don't associate with landlords. None of my family members have ever been landlords, but again, why would this matter? (Edit: and I am younger than 50 in California, most of my friends are renters and have little hope of ever buying a home, and more friends have been forced to leave the state due to high housing costs than I have friends currently. The churn of displacement makes me furious)
The only real reason (and one that I heartily disagree with) to be against corporate ownership of single family homes is that it gives renters access to the amenities that have been hidden behind the door of a 20% down payment in a wealthy neighborhood.
Yes. I have a ton of bias around this issue, and I would imagine most people who care about it (in whatever way) do as well. I think it's much more productive to be attentive to those biases, rather than pretend they don't exist.
Consider the word "landlord". Imagine two people are trying to have conversation about the ethics of rental housing: for one of those people, a "landlord" is the person who broke the law and kicked their family our of their house; for the other, a "landlord" is their brother, who they know to be a reasonable and ethical person. Words mean really different things to different people, and that shapes the whole process of communication. If you did have family or friends who owned rental property, then I'd want to take a step back and think more carefully about how to try to find common ground.
Does that make sense?
I don't have to agree with the value system to understand the reasoning that somebody opposes corporate SFH ownership. I disagree heartily with the value system that prioritizes homeowners over renters, and views renters as disposable. But that is the only value system that I can concieve of that has a clear and reasonable argument that corporate home ownership is bad.
If you want to argue that landlords should not exist, great! If you want to argue that corporations should not exist, great! However, the particular combination that corporations should not be landlords of single family homes (but somehow multi-unit buildings is OK), has always proven to be a completely incoherent and untenable position. At least as far as I can tease out of people.
My best understanding is that the superiority of homeowners in US culture is so strong that people think that corporations shouldn't be able to have a chance at making the same profits that individual homeowners do off of housing. The core problem is the profits, not who is making the profits, but nobody seems to want to admit that homeowner profits are making housing unaffordable. And I view this obsession with corporate ownership of SFH as a way of addressing the core political problem at the heart of our affordability crisis.
I expressed it in pretty simple terms. You can disagree with my opinion, but if you don't understand it at all then I'm not sure what else there is for me to do.
If you think they are breaking the law then specify what law they are breaking.
... and we would have the ability to get laws that best benefit society passed.
Unfortunately
- It's almost impossible to actually hold anyone with significant money accountable for anything
- It's almost impossible to hold any company accountable for anything
- It's almost impossible to get good laws passed, because the companies pay to get the lawmakers elected
Humans are inventive and creative (and often greedy). Once we find a loophole or a point of advantage, we tend to exploit it.
For better or worse, the US legal system is slow to change so it takes a long time of people exploiting the system before the legal framework catches up.
This morning I was reading some outrage post in a local facebook group for my small town. Everyone is up in arms about a new apartment complex being built. Then someone chimes in on the thread asking where everyone was when the permits were approved (hint: no one complaining attended the meetings to voice their concerns). TLDR: get involved in local politics. Too many people assume someone else will do it (or other people will vote so I don't have to), and rarely is that the case.
Maybe if it was called and treated as a landlord revolution it would have gone better.
For those of you who DON'T know the history. Mao did just what OP wants.
It went very very badly. Like millions of people died badly.
What we need is systemic change, one that makes accumulating 19,000 houses unprofitable. Georgism is one potential solution to the problem of housing speculation, without resorting to randomly locking up people that "have too many houses". [1]