Permanently Deleted
Landlords are a feedback loop based on their material interests. If they’re not evil to begin with, their income and ability to pay the mortgage/taxes is dependent on the property remaining intact and anything which threatens the property becomes a threat to them. A principled communist landlord will still probably evict the single mother who’s months behind on rent or the tenant with a dog that destroys the yard. Their relationship to capital will change them over time and reinforce the overall structure. It’s no different than if we became good cops or ethical CEOs.
I’ve tried to solve the landlord thing, it just doesn’t work. I understand a bit of the financials behind being a landlord (I am not one myself). I tried to come up with a equity sharing solution, through a co-op. The answer is always the same. If someone doesn’t pay the rent, the system collapses. You will always be forced to engage in rent-seeking behavior, no matter how generous you are. Under capitalism there is no way to provide rental housing in which everyone shares the cost and benefits of property ownership. Because the system isn’t designed to do that. It’s designed around making money off property. No matter what scheme you come up with, the system will force you to play by its rules.
What would be better is to attack it at the structural level, push the landlord influence on local policy out of town. That’s a much harder fight than “I’m going to own property as my income.” But if you can do that, then you can change policies that fight against what you’re trying to do. But even then, this is only a temporary solution as capital will fight back. If you dominate the city government, you’ll fight the county. If you dominate both of those, you’ll fight the banks and state. You’ll never dominate the banks and state because it’s too big. You would have to come up with a parallel banking system to provide capital to your community. You would have to constantly fight state-level interference which means a huge legal team and probably going to the federal courts. We all know what the federal courts are.
Or, we could all just get together, decide to stop putting labor into the system, and beat the fuckers to death when they come to force labor back into their jobs.
The closest I can come to it is a confederation of personal property, like a co-op of homesteads that can withdraw from the collective agreements benefiting all of them (buying in bulk, selling together, community militias and mutual aid). One of the moral crimes of landlords to me is control over tenants and how those material interests drive things like disallowing pets or cohabitation with a romantic partner or a meaningful use of the lawn which might be detrimental to the value of the home. People should have enough to sustain themselves and the opportunity to self-actualise through their hobbies. The fundamental insecurity of renting means I can’t make a subsistence garden or learn most crafts at home or have the companionship of my dog because he’s 15lbs heavier than the arbitrary limit of most properties. That’s a sick level of Foucault shit which should be replicated where the landlords are sent.
I agree with you on advocating for public housing instead. The UK’s council estates can be tweaked into a great concept. Either raise the legal bar for landlords until it’s no longer profitable/desirable to own property there or rezone single-family housing districts and fund public housing. That will cause a cascade of positive outcomes which ends with them building highspeed rail networks they’re buried next to.
