How private equity is changing housing

Ban corporate ownership of residences. Only individuals, Coops or condominiums. Cap how many rentals an individual can own.

The government should also build massive amounts of housing. Everywhere of all types - apartments, townhouses, single family. After built transferred to the residents as coops.

I love that there are people that can't even conceive of the idea that entities that let out apartments are providing a service to residents. In their view, the natural state of every resident is a desire to own their home.

A fun knock-on effect of this policy proposal: it would effectively halt all new development of dense multifamily.

Yes, the natural state of every resident is to live in their own home. To be clear by home I don't mean "single family detached house on a suburban street", I mean a place to live with water, electricity, and a roof.

Landlords provide no 'service'; they are merely an existence tax.

The market already does not build dense multifamily; what is there to halt?

You can't fathom that someone might not want an ownership stake in the property they happen to reside in, that there could possibly be a downside to that.

You know how it's recommended to sell employee stock grants asap, so your not over indexed into your employer? I.E. if the company you're working for performs poorly or goes under, you don't want to lose your job and wealth, and if it does well, you'll keep making money at your job anyway, so there's no advantage to investing more of your personal capital into your employer than you would if they weren't employing you (barring insider trading).

It's funny that people rarely seem to apply the same reasoning to their dwelling place.

I think everybody has to be obliged, at least once, to move within a year or two of buying a house, just so they can understand what it is to take a huge bath on closing costs.

And that's before you get to things like the furnace going, or the roof failing. Two kinds of people with this "landlords provide absolutely no services" perspective: people so comfortable financially that the y-o-y costs of maintaining a property don't even register, and renters who have never owned and been on the hook for an urgent big-ticket maintenance problem.