this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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~~Well the situation she's describing kind of is that, no?~~
Sorry I realise I misread the meme. The rest of this is still valid but not so relevant. I'll leave it anyway.
If you own a house, and plan to go on a, say, 6 month trip in a few years. You are obviously not going to go through the 6 month+ process of selling the house, storing all of your furniture, etc... only to have to spend 6 months renting while you look for another house to buy.
So either you store my personal stuff and rent it out as furnished on a fixed term rental contract, or it's empty until you get back.
I really appreciate people's furore at ~~landlords~~ housing scalpers - but single homeowners renting out their house are not the problem. It is perfectly acceptable to own a house and rent it out, you are not hoarding housing and some people need/want to rent for non-financial reasons (they travel for work, they don't like the hassle of managing maintenance, etc).
Won't somebody think of the poor homeowner going an a 6 month vacation?!
This is such a bizarrely niche situation it doesn't need to be discussed.
Sure, I suppose it makes sense for the person going on a 6 month trip to not sell their home. The process of finding renters who just want to live there for half a year, making sure you have someone to maintain the property, and having strangers living in your home isn't exactly easy either.
If laws were pass making it illegal to rent single family dwellings it would have a negligible effect on this situation. The group of people able to afford a 6 month trip, yet need the money from rent, and are willing to let strangers live in their house is vanishingly small.
Yeah, like I said I misunderstood the OP.
That said, I think outright banning renting houses would be a terrible idea. Even if we imagine a world in which houses do not cost the astronomical amounts they do today (which just taking landlords out of the market would not guarantee!), most of the time I've rented I wanted to rent... I wouldn't have wanted to be tied to a house with months of buy/sale at either end of my time there, not to mention solicitor's fees. We obviously want a situation where most people can afford and practically buy a house, it seems stupid to completely annihilate the concept of renting in exchange.
I would also argue it's not necessary. If you have more people owning homes, you also have more people either temporarily or semi-permanently vacating them for a variety of reasons. Travelling for work or fun, moving in with a partner, etc. In those situations I don't see why the need for rental properties (which probably remains relatively small if we consider only those people who actively prefer renting, rather than those who simply can't afford anything else) shouldn't be met by landlords who own a single property that they don't live in... also as you say a relatively small group. Tax the shit out of or legislate against multiple property owners all you like as far as I'm concerned, though.
I know I spent a long time perfectly content to rent, I liked the flexibility and I didn't have time to learn shit like how to fix my washing machine. I wouldn't have wanted to be forced to either live with strangers or spend months buying/selling because it's illegal to rent to me.
That's not what I suggested. I suggested banning renting single family housing. If someone wants to rent out their basement suite or turn their house into a duplex that's fine. That and apartment buildings would cover the people who want to rent. The landlord should have to live on the property they are renting.
An appartment is still single family housing unless it has multiple families living in it. This seems like it would just drive landlords to evict families to cram more people into buildings. Or if you mean the building has to have more than one family on separate floors... How does that help? Why should those who choose to rent be forced to live in a flat or HMO?
What would I have done as a 21 year old wanting to find somewhere to live? Here there aren't many flats, there are lots of terraced houses. I wouldn't have wanted to buy and tie myself down, so in this situation I'd either have to pile into a cramped HMO or live in someone's spare room! This is worse for renters and not that much worse for landlords. Here they already cram as many students into what could be a family house as they can because it makes more money, this just makes it mandatory.
Ok, forcing landlords to live on the property kills owning multiple properties... But why not just deal with that? That's the problem! Not people renting houses. Ban or heavily tax multiple residential property ownership. 100% ban corporations from owning residential properties. But housing associations, individuals renting out their one house, and other similar small scale letting is good for people who want to rent.
If that was feasible they would already be doing it. It would also be harder to find people willing to live in these cramped places once there are houses available to purchase.
I don't see the practical difference here, where is the person who owns the property living if they are renting it out? Personally this sounds like a loop-hole that would allow married couples to purchase a 2nd property to rent. But sure, banning corporations from owning residential properties and individuals from owning more than 1 sounds like a good idea to me.
They are already doing it, I just said so. And I explained previously the reasons that someone might want to rent out their house short term. And if a couple own two houses between them, is that really such a disaster? There is, as I've tried to express, a demand for rental properties, even in a world where we can all afford houses. Arbitrarily reducing this to specific types of houses, or specific living conditions doesn't help renters, it just makes things more difficult.