Corporations shouldn't be allowed to own residential properties. Period.
replies(4):
If corporations can't own residential properties, how would anyone rent a house? How would home builders build model homes? How would Trusts manage real estate?
This is a complex and nuanced problem.
"How would home builders build model homes?" - This is a great point. I should have said "after the home is built"
"How would Trusts manage real estate" - for residential real-estate, they wouldn't. An individual would. But I just want to point out that I never said that corporations shouldn't own real estate. I said they shouldn't own residential real estate.
It's only as complex an nuanced as we make it. For most of history, individual people owned real estate. Only recently did we manage to screw that up. We can unscrew it.
Corporate ownership of real estate is ancient - read about the land rents (and in-kind labor rents) that early Christian monasteries were entitled to in late Roman/early-middle-ages Europe, or how Buddhist monasteries have been funded from local levees for thousands of years. Or how the British crown as a corporate entity currently vested in Charles III still owns substantial chunks of British real estate. History is long and for most of it it was not the case that ordinary middle class people even existed, let alone owned houses.