[amw]

Individual landlords can be moral, upstanding people, and the incentive structure around deriving your income from rents can systemically produce inhumane outcomes. They are not mutually exclusive.

[noduerme]

>> the incentive structure around deriving your income from rents can systemically produce inhumane outcomes

It's also the only thing that produces new construction. Properly regulated and harnessed, the incentives are necessary to draw capital to building.

[amw]

> It's also the only thing that produces new construction

It's not, though. People constructed housing for thousands of years without landlords. There are plenty of ways to fund constructions without markets. We have built a society that prefers to organize it that way, but that is also a society with more vacant units than there are homeless, where it is _normal_ to spend 50% or more of one's income on rent. Those outcomes, I argue, are inhumane, but also, maybe more controversially, avoidable in a system organized around something other than profit.

[joshlemer]

Exactly! And also the rest of the benefits of speculation apply to housing just as much as anything https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculation#Economic_benefits

Namely, real estate investors provide liquidity to the market, bringing price stability and absorbing risk from developers and homeowners.

[itake]

I'm just starting being a landlord and I am one bad tenant away from copying the inhumane practices associated with companies that deal with a plethora of bad tenants. I purchase my home last year and I am renting below cost.

If everyone behaves nicely, it works out well for everyone. But if a party doesn't follow the agreement, everyone is in for a world of hurt.