This seems like a great theoretical internet take and not applicable to the real world in the least.

So some 50 year old blue collar dude who saves just enough to buy a duplex and live in half of it, but can’t stop working or he’ll starve, has suddenly been propelled from the working class into the lazy, cigar-smoking, top hat twirling capital class?

Yes.

If he wants to not be in that "lazy, cigar-smoking, top hat twirling capital class" (as you put it - because apparently hyperbole and gross misrepresentation of an argument counts as "discussion" on Hacker News nowadays), he is welcome to transition his ownership of that duplex into, say, a housing cooperative consisting of himself and the other half of that duplex (or - more likely - a cooperative for the land and the duplex's exterior, and retain ownership of his own unit while putting the other unit up for sale - effectively forming a COA, but cooperatively owned).

Don't put the hyperbole on me. I'm just repeating what I hear from the far left. They love to pain landlords as some evil 1%ers when in fact many are middle income people trying to get by.

And great, start a cooperative. But for everyone else who wants to rent a place, there are landlords.

Having known someone who owned and personally maintained a small apartment complex, you are wrong. My FIL is the hardest working person I know.

> My FIL is the hardest working person I know.

A landlord's wealth derives from being a middleman between the tenants and the property, not from the landlord's own labor. That wealth is quite literally the whole point of being a landlord in the first place; if the income from rent didn't significantly exceed the value of the labor your FIL performs as "maintenance", then why would he bother with dealing with all the headaches of property ownership if he could instead just be an employee of the tenants themselves (said tenants forming e.g. a housing cooperative)?

That is: there's nothing a landlord does that the tenants couldn't do themselves (whether directly or by hiring someone to do it on their behalf). It is therefore not labor alone that defines the relationship between a landlord and one's tenants. Your FIL may be "the hardest working person [you] know", but he's still a middleman in the ownership class.

Sure the landlord is doing something I can’t, as a tenant, can’t do myself - if all I have is an income of a few thousand a month and I need housing, the landlord is providing me housing I couldn’t otherwise afford.

You could pool your money with other people needing housing and collectively obtain that housing, with all y'all having equal ownership of it. This is known as a "housing cooperative" - kind of like if you rented from a corporation, but one in which you and your fellow tenants (and nobody else) are all equal shareholders.

A housing cooperative is about as economically efficient as it gets; you and your tenants would only need to pay the bare minimum to keep up with loan payments (and possibly, as I've proposed elsewhere in this thread and others, a land value tax) and maintenance, with no middlemen taking any cut out of your rent.

But what if I don't want to own?

If I'm some early 20's person just starting out, no money to my name, I need a cheap place to rent. I don't want to own or in fact, I probably can't own.

And it's not just early 20's people. I moved to a new city for 1 year with the intent of returning. I don't want to buy anything, I want to rent.

Landlord's are providing me a service in that case - housing.

> If I'm some early 20's person just starting out, no money to my name, I need a cheap place to rent. I don't want to own or in fact, I probably can't own.

Which is exactly why it's handy to be able to pool resources with other people looking to do the same thing, thus spreading the debt (if there is any) - and the risks thereof - across multiple parties. Think of it less like a real estate purchase and more like a startup, because that's what it is.

> I moved to a new city for 1 year with the intent of returning.

In which case a housing cooperative would've served your needs just fine. Again, less like owning a home outright, and more like owning a share in a company (because, well, you would own a share in a company). And when you're done with it you can sell that share.

But I don't want to buy and sell into a cooperative. I can't pool my money, I have none beyond my paycheck. I want to rent a place. I need landlords for that.

I've heard stories about cooperatives in NYC and the bureaucracy can be a negative. It sounds like an HOA or condo board.

What kind of housing someone can afford is a political question. Our current answer to it is that this should be resolved through market mechanisms, which creates high prices alongside scarcity

Ain't even the market mechanisms themselves that drive the high prices; rather, it's what those market mechanisms track.

Transitioning from land prices to land rental values - i.e. gradually moving toward a 100% land value tax - would address both high prices and scarcity by taxing land consumption - and, accordingly, encouraging urban density in order to amortize that tax, thus alleviating scarcity and reducing residential expenses. Same market at play (a land value tax definitionally taxes the market value of land); vastly improved outcome.

If you're just starting out it doesn't matter if homes are $100k or $1M, you don't have money to purchase.

People act like renting is some sort of evil forced upon people, but don't realize there is a big market for renting. People don't always want to own their own housing.

There’s nothing wrong with renting, I support strong, high quality, inexpensive public housing. I don’t support private landlords and the commodification of housing.

Property management is work. Owning property is not. For small scale landlords, this is often the same person, and they may do a lot of property management.