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Comment by hanoz | Hacker News Reader

"Just build more houses", yet alone when framed as "it's up to you to convince your neighbors to let you to build more houses" just doesn't cut the mustard any more.

We need serious changes that are actually going to make a difference, along the lines of (for residential property):

* Outlawing mortgages for non occupiers.

* Sharing of capital gains with tenants.

* A complete end to no fault evictions.

* Universal right to buy for tenants.

* Putative tax for rental income.

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That would basically kill the entire rental market and force everyone who wants to move to a new place buy a place instead of having the option to rent which would make changing jobs super painful.

I moved across the country after college for a job and my brother has done that like 5 times changing jobs. Buying and selling a place is a huge pain and has an extremely high transaction cost compared to renting.

Many people seem eager to screw over tens of millions of renters if it means they think they’d get a better chance to buy a place.

Many people think landlords are really just slumlords and yeah, it isn't hard to see why.

If there's a problem with a slumlord, you address that problem.

We don't ban restaurants because some of them have health code violations or food poisoning outbreaks; we get the individually offending restaurants to fix their crap.

There's an inherent power disparity though. There's a high probability the slumlord has more resources than you, and he's not beholden to his 'opponent' providing his housing. So it's not likely your average renter has the capability to address these kinds of problems, which means you need some sort of power structure that has a mandate to enforce such things. Thus, laws and bans on certain behaviours and actions.

Yes, there are already laws against slumlording in most places already. It's not on an individual renter to hold the power, but on a licensing or health/building code enforcement government agency to prevent uninhabitable or sub-standard housing from being rented without recourse. The tenant just has to complain to them and the government comes down with the power.

Not counting college, I've rented at 7 different places, representing about 13 years in total. None were slums. All were far better than me having to buy an entire place each time I wanted to move somewhere.

Remove slums? Hell yes! Remove rental properties? Hell no!

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