One landlord may be more or less "ethical and community minded" than another, but being a landlord is 100% about profiting from somebody else's precariousness. The best you can say is, "Don't hate the player, hate the game." I appreciate a landlord who fixes the broken pipes and doesn't totally gouge me... but that always feels like Stockholm Syndrome.

Would being transparent with the renter about the total cost of owning the property, like the mortgage payment, property taxes, insurance, etc., then basing the rent payment off that total cost plus 10% or something be ethical?

I don't see what difference that would make. They still get to set the price, and you can either take it or leave it.

I also recognize that many people don’t want the commitment that comes with purchasing a home.

I suspect that this number is extremely low.

How can the need for those people be met without landlords existing?

Easily with far (far far far) fewer landlords.

It's genuinely ridiculous to paint "rental homes" as some boutique service offered as a choice to home-owners who have money for a house but just don't want the "commitment" (?!?!?!?!?) of not throwing a huge portion of your money away every month. Absurd.

I don't hate small landlords. We all have to betray humanity to avoid being homeless. We work at unscrupulous companies, because what other kind of companies are usually hiring? But we don't have to contort ourselves to the point of breaking every single bone in our bodies to morally justify profiting from the unfair precariousness of people terrified of homelessness.

[–] zbyte64@awful.systems 6 points 7 months ago

Yeah, the short of it is if you are a landlord and you're not undermining your own industry by encouraging tenants to become owners of their own personal property, then you're not community minded in the socialist (own the means of production) sense. There are exceptions, like one case where a rapper bought a poor neighborhood but did so to keep rent hikes and evictions from happening, arguably giving those families more stability so they have a chance to build family wealth.

[–] dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net 0 points 7 months ago (2 children)

The one issue I would raise with your analysis is that if things were very different (like all people who wanted a home had one) a second home rented out not to the desperate but people in a transitional state could be a benefit to the community. Think college students who are attending school somewhere they do not plan to live long term, and who prefer not to live in a dormitory. Or people who are staying for a few months in another city for their work or visiting family, where a hotel would be prohibitively expensive.

[–] antidote101@lemmy.world 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Interestingly enough, something like 86% of Vietnamese people own their own homes...

In part it's because 70% of the population are farmers, and if you live in a rural area and pass a test on raising crops the government will just assign you a plot to farm.

I imagine home ownership is also very high in Japan, where they've had a negative interest rate and deflation for 25 years. Their housing bubble burst with their aged population explosion and the total population being in decline.

[–] sentient_loom@sh.itjust.works 4 points 7 months ago

Yes, if things were different then things would be different.