If we want low-income people to be able to live in certain areas then the best solution is to just give them money and let them obtain housing at market rates. We can do that through income redistribution, by taxing high-income people (which may include some landlords among others). Forcing landlords to rent at below market rates distorts the market and causes artificial housing shortages.

>taxing landlords

Don't you think that would just drive up the market price ? (by restricting supply i.e. making landlordship less desirable)

Income is taxed at the same rates regardless of source. That doesn't make landlording any more or less desirable than other investments. In general all classes of long-term investments generate roughly the same risk-adjusted returns.

OP edited their comment, after I had already replied, from "taxing landlords" to "taxing high-income people (which may include some landlords)" so you missed that earlier nuance.

> "If we want low-income people to be able to live in certain areas then the best solution is to just give them money..."

yeah, that didn't turn out so well for higher education and healthcare. so no to that.

housing markets are distorted in a thousand ways. a solution like that might be appealing for its simplicity, but what we need to do is the hard work of rationalizing a death by a thousand cuts. start by aggressively repealing every zoning/building regulation that's not tied to solid safety concerns (and not nebulous and nefarious ones). eventually you'd be in a position to repeal (in CA) both prop 13 and rent control (but not saying that'll happen), which are complementary distortions, but only when the market is functioning well enough not to need (for sociopolitical purposes, not economic ones) them.

With that model, if the government are going to be effectively paying whatever the landlords demand for rent, then the best solution would be for the government to seize rental housing from the landlords (perhaps with some token compensation so they don't complain too much) and run it as a non-profit rental service, i.e. social housing for all.

Obviously not the best solution for the landlords, but, really, so what? Removing a class of parasites from the housing system would be a feature, not a bug.

Because they already get a tax break?

Why should the landlord fit the bill because Jonhy does want to live in a high sought place?

The 'humanitarian' causes are a way to disguise totalitarian acts.

We have laws, property and trade so we don't have to go back to primitive ways.

> Why should the landlord fit the bill because Jonhy does want to live in a high sought place?

It's just one of the very few risks a person of wealth might have to accept, should they decide to use their elevated position in society to inflict landlordism upon people.

if landlords are able to extract more profit than is reasonable for the service they provide (and I'd argue they often do), then that is a problem regardless of how well off the tenants are.

I agree that everyone should be guaranteed food, water, and shelter (at minimum), but I don't think anyone is entitled to live on the most desirable pieces of land in the world.

How do you decide what the "reasonable" threshold is? In my mind, the reasonable price is whatever the market decides. On what basis can anyone assert otherwise?

The nice thing about using markets to set prices and deal with scarcity is that they're self-adjusting.

markets are neat mechanisms, but no market exists in a sociopolitical vaccum, so such blind faith in them is misguided (to put it charitably).

without getting too far into the weeds, and because housing is a durable and necessary good that's proportional to both population and productive capacity, in a free and fair market you'd expect housing prices to track with inflation. that's the reasonable expectation. over time, we've seen housing prices detach from that baseline for a variety of reasons unrelated to its core responsibility of sheltering people. see, for instance, the case-shiller index.

those detachments are distortions to the idealization of a free and fair market to ensure house prices continually rise for political and personal gain, despite the lack of sound economic principles underlying that distended rise.

fair question. the way I am using "reasonable" here is very subjective. one rough way to look at it would be to consider the relationship between median household income and median rent for a 2BR apartment. in my area, median gross household income is ~$4250/month and median rent for a 2BR is ~$1750. so after taxes, the median household would be spending about half their net income to live in a median 2BR. to me, this seems like a lot.

my personal take is that the root cause of this is the culture and policy surrounding home ownership, particularly for the middle class. we encourage people to take out a mortgage to acquire a home as soon as possible, and we tell them it's not financially irresponsible for a single physical asset to make up most of their net worth. in fact, we tell them it's the best investment they could possibly make. we grant tax breaks and lower the required down payments to extend this opportunity to even more people. so we end up with a bunch of people who are either highly leveraged on their mortgage, or have paid it off but have minimal other assets. this makes it very important that house values keep going up, so we deliberately distort the housing market so they do.

something I'd like to underscore is that the housing market is very much not a free market. there are tons of restrictions on what type of things can be build, how they can be built, what they can look like, what they can be used for, etc. even if you think free markets are effective pricing mechanisms (and I mostly do), that doesn't really have much to do with the prevailing rent in most areas.

Living in a nice neighborhood isn't a human right.

If they want to pay lower rent, they can do so, but usually in a lower quality neighborhood.

Well, there are pros and cons but one of the issues I see, living somewhere that has dirt cheap council homes for some poor people, is it breeds huge resentment against low income earners and causes people to focus on "this development needs to be X% affordable" and totally ignore the question of "why are we not making the average home affordable instead of focusing on some lottery for the poor?"

But, of course, the political incentives are aligned to encourage homes becoming ever more expensive at the behest of homeowners.

Of course rent shouldn't be income adjusted. Neither should and other good be income adjustment. The price mechanism works and is a good thing.

What would be the point of striving for a raise if your costs increased proportionately to income? The possibility of a higher quality of life gets people to work hard and benefit us all.

OP never claimed that those with low income shouldn't pay lower rent, they simply claimed that "Landlord tech" is not good for those individuals. Someone is allowed to see the benefits to certain things while also realizing that it may not benefit everyone the same way.

To my reading of their comment, it was implied later on:

> The oppressors are not always landlords - they are [...] other tenants who sit on their rent controlled housing until they die.