Remember that shooting at Blackstone’s headquarters? They tried to blame the motive on football somehow but the shooter targeted the CEO of Blackstone’s real estate group, killing her along with a few others.
In my opinion, hoarding real estate is even more heinous than these tech billionaires who “merely” hoard money.
Shelter is a basic human need. Money is merely a means to an end.
It’s on the same level as dumping food in a dumpster and pouring bleach on it because it expires soon and so that hungry people can’t eat it.
An old manager got fired because she donated food to a homeless shelter when instructed to open it all and pour the liquids down the drain and the food into a trash can with the pink mystery cleaner whose MSDS mysteriously went missing in all the stores I went to.
As with many things, it just served to further radicalized me.
In a just world that would be a criminal act and your old manager would be doing something normal and unremarkable
Indeed. In a sane world, it would be standard practice to donate foods long before expiration dates and nobody would need to dig through garbage hoping for scraps of a meal.
In this world though, The administrative assistant started donating everything and planned things strategically so the new store manager and district managers wouldn’t know, and anyone watching cameras would think we’re just helping her taking our normal trash out.
She kept it up through 5 or 6 managers before I left. As far as I know, nobody ever caught on that the empty bottles by the sink were just what a few of the employees drank every day, or the wrappers often weren’t even products we sell.
It’s insane the hoops some have to jump through just to donate food that nobody wants
Apparently someone with an AR-15 agreed with us as well 😁
But what you you think they invest their money in?
Yatchs.
Drugs.
Child rape.
The gunman dying too was really too bad. Like Luigi Mangione being blamed as the shooter for the healthcare exec has kept the idea of murdering ceos more alive.
There was more Luigi?
Even if there were small independent landlords all over the place, fuck them anyway.
Property should not be an investment opportunity.
Apparently I’m completely ignorant in this topic. Why is the concept of landlords so bad? It is not because I believe they are good,I have just never thought much of it, and I’ve lived in multiple rented apartments. What’s the alternative? Genuine question here. Should the apartments be owned by the municipality/government? Is the idea that housing will be so cheap, if the properties aren’t used for investment that everyone can afford to buy themselves?
Tenant Co-Op.
Basically, its anarcho-syndicalism, but applied to a building a bunch of people live in, instesd of a productive enterprise.
You can have a building where the people who live in the building pay rent as basically a tax, where other people who live in the building basically vote on who is charge of actually doing property management duties.
The building and its inhabitants are its own little self-sealed governmental unit, to some extent. Collectively, they own the building, collectively, they are responsible for it, and for making sure codes aren’t violated and taxes are paid to the government, etc.
The non bullshit version of an HOA, you might call it.
These are legally possible in many, many parts of the world. They just aren’t popular … largely because the first step of doing this is buying out the property from the current owner.
People who rent definitionally tend to not have much money, even in large groups, as people who… own buildings.
You theoretically could have something like a hybrid between a ‘government owned housing’ model and this model: 50 50 match, if the tenants can provide half the money/financing, the government provides the other half… or maybe it offers something like a tax rebate or something to the owner that is getting ‘bought out’, instead of directly giving them half the money…
A whole lot of things are possible.
Most people just don’t think about it, because doing anything they’ve never heard of before ‘is crazy’ and ‘will never work’.
And yes, as you say, de-financializing homes would go a long, long way to make prices more stable.
Limits on max price valuation increases or decreases in a given time span.
Limits on how much money going into buying a building can be financed, vs paid with actual cash on hand currency.
Some kind of structure that penalizes organizations that buy or sell huge numbers of properties that they haven’t held for at least a decade.
Rework how property tax valuations work.
Peg a ‘reasonable rent rate’ to the area median income * sq footage of apartment, ignore location and amenities. If you are charging rent that is some threshold % above that? Landlord’s tax obligation scales up. Also works in reverse, the government will subsidize via tax rebate landlords who offer cheaper rent.
(this makes 1000000x more sense than the government trying to literally purchase and then run a whole city district worth of property, to then make it ‘affordable housing’. Its pegged around the median, it should thus net to roughly 0 expense or benefit to the government budget, but it disincentivizes luxury rent prices and directly uses the luxury property owner tax to subsidize affordable property owners)
There are many, many things that could be changed.
All landlords are housing scalpers. That’s all they are. Making private profit money off a finite resource that other people, normally the most vulnerable classes of people, need to survive.
If people want to invest in owning property, buy industrial and commercial land. Nobody needs a warehouse or an office building to live. They need houses to live.
But residential landlords won’t do that because managing an industrial commercial property means you’re dealing with a business, people with negotiating power, knowledge of law and rights, and the ability to enforce them, which is too hard. Landlords only want to exploit poorer, (financially and time-wise) people.
Corporations should not be able to own housing.
No single family homes, or condos at all. And no more than 2 apartment buildings. Combined, across all businesses related to them, both up and down subsidiary lines. Can’t just create separate corps to handle each development, they already do that to limit liability somewhat.
Empty apartments increase taxes when uninhabited for extended periods. Longer they go unrented, the higher the taxes are, no limit. As soon as they are rented out the taxes start to drop back to standard levels. If any apartment meets the criteria for those higher tax rates, other tax incentives the company might normally qualify for are null until back to normal. So if they want to get a tax incentive for something, they need to ensure they actually fill their apartments.
Direct effect would very quickly be lowered rent prices to fill otherwise outrageously priced empty apartments.
Owning 10 houses you don’t live in while charging other people to live there makes you more than a landlord.
It makes you a PIECE OF FUCKING SHIT
Parasites deserve to be removed.
I don’t see the difference between being a landlord and being a piece of shit, tbh. All landlords are parasites.
Removed by mod
This is the same con they pull with farming. They use the idea of the small family farmer to pass legislation that mainly helps massive agribusiness.
They will always keep one or two family farms to trot out the next time they need to legalize dumping fertilizer runoff directly into the aquifer
We need a revolution. Tax billionaires out of existence. We need to go back to the 70% pre Reagan tax rate
So, these numbers are a bit old …
https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/landlord-statistics
… basically, while OP is very likely correct specifically in NYC regarding apartments…
Broadly, at a national level?
The vast majority of single family rentals are provided by a landlord with less than 5 five rental properties.
IE, boomers trying to become rich by becoming petite landlords…perhaps roughly comparable to pre-Soviet kulaks.
This same pattern is borne out by more recent median age of a home seller / home purchaser: its 59 or 60. The ‘median age of a home seller/buyer’… yeah it pretty much just tracks the average age of a Boomer, in the last 30 years.
As you can see, to the point that now, now the median age of a US first time home buyer is actually 40, if you extend this graph to current data, now, Q2 2026.
The boomers all went into the 90s and 00s and then 10s getting an increasing media diet of real estate is the path to wealth!… we started getting a bunch of TV shows about home renovations and house flipping… and woo.boy do the boomers love their boob tubes.
I have no doubt that in more literally concentrated areas, with even higher price floors, yeah, its more dominated by larger to hyperhuge organizations.
But on net?
While private equity moving in and building a development in an area, or starting to purchase a bunch of on market/for sale homes in a region… while things like that are often the sort of local reset for ‘comps’, seen as signals to boomer kulaks of well shit, I should do the same thing for myself!…
… The boomers are the ones that actually do the mass of the work of directly making home prices go up, as well as voting up anything that will benefit existing homeowners, and voting down anything that will add cost to existing homeowners.
They collectively decided that making their homes go up in value was their ticket to a secure retirement.
The problem is that if every boomer does this, it literally guarantees economic, demographic, and social collapse… new family formation becomes difficult to impossible, social welfare systems collapse, the broad concept of tactic agreement that the government is de facto legitimate erodes rapidly.
Any boomer that complains about or is worried about white birth rates tanking even harder than non white birth rates, that believes in ‘great replacement theory’?
They’re idiots. They are the cause of the effect they are observing.
Removed by mod
They were also originally called the ‘Me’ generation… and that’s accurate. They’re broadly spoiled brats, malignant narcissists. To the extent that this was surprising and unexpected, difficult to comprehend by the Silent generation and older.
Try telling a Boomer they’re actually wrong about literally anything.
That’s rude, to them. You’re insulting them.
Because that would mean they aren’t already perfect.
They’ll never thank you for correcting an error.
They don’t want to learn and grow, they want to be told how wonderful and smart they are and always have been.
The Boomers of the US will be literally reviled by future political historians… there’s no way to be objective about what has happened, what they have done, how they squandered their immense privilege… and were so immensely arrogant while doing so… no way to comprehend it, and not be digusted.
They burned down the world.
… simply incredible.
Removed by mod
Yep.
Like… this guy:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=71UuMMsydHA
Closest I’ll ever get to being in WW2 was playing Battlefield 1942 as a kid… and… I still can’t make it through Saving Private Ryan without crying.
I’ve since been through traumatic shit in my own life, become a cynical bastard… but goddamnit, I still have a heart, I still feel the pain of others.
Of course I am generalizing, there are non shitty boomers… but most of them might as well be aliens in skin suits, I can describe and like academically attempt to understand them… but I am not like them, I cannot put myself into their headspace.
Removed by mod
What in the fuck?
The mod apparently deleted all of your comments in this chain, but not mine?
They, and other companies like them, are the ones buying up all of the extra real estate in the US, and then price fixing everyone’s rent. This is how our housing is so expensive, manufactured low supply and price fixing through software.
Housing is a human right
Yes, pitch forks and torches would be great but nothing ever happens. I see no action.
There is a technical term for mom&pop landlords. Parasites.
Sidebar, being a landlord sounds like an awful way to earn a living.
“Mom and pop landlord” is an oxymoron.
(Mom and pop) landlords are helping us with housing the same way a tape worm would be helping us digest our food.
Parasites all the way down
