It's not "no more landlords", but removing many of them from the market, reducing competition. Many people want to own but are priced out of the market, and many people who do own end up leaving very large chunks of their incomes as bank profits. I'm focusing on the middle of the market where people would buy if prices were more affordable, not edges of the market where people would only buy if housing was basically given away.
Private landlords are basically lenders. The houses are there for anyone to buy. The landlords-to-be have the cash, or credit rating and scope for risk taking, to buy these houses and rent them out.
I’m not saying they are some kind of godsend, rather that they are present precisely because renters wouldn’t buy the houses they live in, for whatever reason. If you take away the private landlords, you’d need to find that capital elsewhere, and it seems poor people don’t have it.
State-owned housing? Mutual housing? Promoting good transport so people can live further out? Lots of solutions I think, but not sure adding friction to the current set up will do anything.
Landlords compete with aspiring homeowners, raising prices. Raising prices benefit landlords as what they get to charge for their “cost of capital” gains a higher proportion vs their cost of actually maintaining the property.
I’m talking explicitly about lowering the cost of housing by reducing the amount of capital in the market from landlords.
Right, and where do the renters live? Someone needs to own the houses. Not every renter is on the cusp of buying.
If you make houses more expensive for landlords and don’t introduce some other source of housing, at best it’ll be a wash: lower prices for houses but extra taxes meaning landlords charge more or less the same rent. Or maybe prices won’t move much but landlords will charge more rent to cover their higher costs.
We are not at risk of an abundance of empty housing with nobody to live in it.
You lower prices by reducing competition from landlords, then more people who rent will buy. There's a long way to go before you get to the point of people who don't want to buy a house feeling forced to do so because they can't find a rental.
I don't know the name of the logical fallacy, but the argument you're making is imaging a far away extreme situation being undesirable and using that to justify not making moderate changes.
