Comment by happyopossum
2 days ago
> Profiting from vacation housing feels different to me than profiting from people’s primary shelter, which is a basic necessity.
If you believe that nobody should profit from providing housing, what do you propose as the incentives for people to build, capitalize, and maintain said housing?
That's fair, and I'm not claiming rent disappears, or that nobody should ever earn money from operating rental housing. Some people will always need or want to rent, and providing rental housing is real work that should be compensated.
The distinction I'm trying to draw is between operating housing as a service and owning housing primarily as a financial asset whose returns are driven by scarcity and leverage.
In a healthier system, the incentive to own rental property would look closer to running a utility or a hospitality business: you earn steady, relatively bounded returns for providing a well-run service (maintenance, risk, capital deployment, tenant experience), not outsized returns from appreciation and from pushing rents faster than incomes.
People would still buy rental properties to earn income, but the business case would be built more on operational efficiency and quality of service, and less on financial engineering, tax advantages, and asset inflation.
Practically, that can show up in a lot of forms that already exist in pieces today: regulated or capped-return rental models, co-ops and shared-equity housing, community land trusts, public-private development, developer-operator splits, or tax structures that favor building and selling over hoarding and rent maximization.
So I'm not saying "don’t make money on rent." I'm saying a system where most of the upside comes from perpetual control of a scarce necessity will naturally concentrate ownership and make entry harder and harder. A system where most of the upside comes from creating, improving, and operating housing can still support rentals while keeping the door open for new owners.
Well, the primary incentive today, for most people, is a place to live. Profit just skews the preference on how that is accomplished.