If you buy a residential property only to rent it out, it is not housing for you, it is solely an investment.
Imagine a world without landlords. It's way worse than the one we live in now. It's a world where you cannot rent, you can only choose between buying or being homeless.
Landlords provide housing and most of them don't make a ton of money out of it. They hope for future appreciation of the property, which they can only realize if they sell, and their monthly income often doesn't cover the cost of ownership.
I don't believe they exist.
If you are referring to corporate owners of apartment buildings, that's one thing. But to say there is a huge class of people who are landlords is just unrealistic. Very few people own more than one home, and even fewer people own more than two.
To wit:
> Of the approximately 50 million rental housing units in the United States, around 41% of the rental units are owned by mom and pop landlords, also known as individual investor landlords. That means approximately 20.5 million units are overseen by mom and pop landlords.
https://getflex.com/blog/landlord-statistics/
Also, from the same site, the average landlord has 3 properties. That means there are more than 6 million individual landlords in the US. I'm not going to nitpick whether that's "huge" or not; the point is proven.
In a population of 330 million. That's ~1.8% of the population. Hardly a "huge class".
Most people who currently rent don't want landlord. You already make that point yourself: the alternative for them is being homeless, because they are unable to buy due to high housing prices and restrictions on getting mortgages.
In many cases the landlord are making boatloads of money, simply by being the middleman between tenant and bank. They are not the selfless charities you are making them out to be.
Property developers only build things because they know they can rent them out directly or sell them to landlords who will. None of this exists without a market that will demand it.
Why is housing different in your mind? Or is this an American view that everything must be a "free" market? Note that the government doesn't need to be the sole provider of housing, but allowing the government to compete with private industry hardly seems unreasonable.
Is that really preferable to your landlord being an individual you can sue in court?
There is no world without landlords.
They're also there to provide housing services to all including the most needy that many landlords might reject.
See (for example): https://www.housing.wa.gov.au
Do you really want to be a slave, and for all of your descendants to be slaves?
Government ownership of housing is the worst solution.
It's a smart investment that saves on policing costs and reduces crime .. that other wise the same citizens would have to pay for and live with.
Do try and think more broadly and out of the box. The slavery stuff is just ridiculous (you're US, right?).
> Is that really preferable to your landlord being an individual you can sue in court?
Yes, in the country I live in that's much more preferable than to have an individual I can sue. Public housing was the scheme that afforded most people in this country with their first dwelling, and the government in the 1950-1960s publicly incentivised the construction of 1 million dwellings.
So yes to your question, I prefer if I have the option to rent an apartment from my government than from an individual, thank you very much.
With rare exceptions, developers want nothing to do with owning the properties they build. They want to finish the build and get those properties off their books and close the contruction loans and move on.
So somone has to own the property after build is complete.
Possibly to the point where a mortgage would be cheaper and easier than a rental is currently.
Governments could set themselves up as a monopoly landlord for those people unable to afford even cheap homes.
If you wanted to make the current situation worse, congratulations, you have found a solution! Now you can't get out of your rent because your landlord is the damn government!
If a tenants rent only covered the the monthly mortgage, that's still a 5.5% ROI assuming 20% down, 30 year mortgage. Accounting for interest rates, then the ROI is 5.5-(R*0.8)% returns.
But rents go up yearly to match market rents so the actual returns are closer to 15-22% (though it tends to scale poorly which is why REITs pay so little IMO). Even after accounting for loan interest & costs, real estate is a very attractive 8%-15% investment with very favorable tax incentives. E.g. gains gan be deferred as long as they are invested in other real estate, positive cash flow is typically tax free due to depreciation of property - despite it's market value going up!.