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This is an inauspicious start... would your answer change based on how I answer?

I have lived in rental housing far longer than I have owned a house, and my personal politics are such that I don't think that land should be private property. I don't associate with landlords. None of my family members have ever been landlords, but again, why would this matter? (Edit: and I am younger than 50 in California, most of my friends are renters and have little hope of ever buying a home, and more friends have been forced to leave the state due to high housing costs than I have friends currently. The churn of displacement makes me furious)

The only real reason (and one that I heartily disagree with) to be against corporate ownership of single family homes is that it gives renters access to the amenities that have been hidden behind the door of a 20% down payment in a wealthy neighborhood.




> would your answer change based on how I answer?

Yes. I have a ton of bias around this issue, and I would imagine most people who care about it (in whatever way) do as well. I think it's much more productive to be attentive to those biases, rather than pretend they don't exist.

Consider the word "landlord". Imagine two people are trying to have conversation about the ethics of rental housing: for one of those people, a "landlord" is the person who broke the law and kicked their family our of their house; for the other, a "landlord" is their brother, who they know to be a reasonable and ethical person. Words mean really different things to different people, and that shapes the whole process of communication. If you did have family or friends who owned rental property, then I'd want to take a step back and think more carefully about how to try to find common ground.

Does that make sense?


No, not at all, it doesn't make any sense. The closest I can think is that you do not have a solid connection from a value system to a reason that corporations should not own single family homes.

I don't have to agree with the value system to understand the reasoning that somebody opposes corporate SFH ownership. I disagree heartily with the value system that prioritizes homeowners over renters, and views renters as disposable. But that is the only value system that I can concieve of that has a clear and reasonable argument that corporate home ownership is bad.

If you want to argue that landlords should not exist, great! If you want to argue that corporations should not exist, great! However, the particular combination that corporations should not be landlords of single family homes (but somehow multi-unit buildings is OK), has always proven to be a completely incoherent and untenable position. At least as far as I can tease out of people.

My best understanding is that the superiority of homeowners in US culture is so strong that people think that corporations shouldn't be able to have a chance at making the same profits that individual homeowners do off of housing. The core problem is the profits, not who is making the profits, but nobody seems to want to admit that homeowner profits are making housing unaffordable. And I view this obsession with corporate ownership of SFH as a way of addressing the core political problem at the heart of our affordability crisis.


> No, not at all, it doesn't make any sense.

I expressed it in pretty simple terms. You can disagree with my opinion, but if you don't understand it at all then I'm not sure what else there is for me to do.




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