If there weren't land lords, where would renters live? Would they build shacks in the forest and fields? Would they build custom homes on lots in the desert? Im not sure if most are capable nor well funded enough. Do we give them houses?

I think there’s an interesting question of why housing has outpaced inflation, but I’m not sure you can just pin it on “landlords.”

A small, individual landlord has no pricing power. They’re competing in a market against all others. You’d have to control a substantial fraction of a local market to be able to raise prices above the going rates and still rent your units.

I think the most likely answer is a combination of several factors.

1) Not enough new housing being built in desirable areas (supply), cause by some combination of drastic increase in cost of labor and materials, and NIMBY regulations.

2) Actual collusion to fix prices. There have been a few recent court cases about collusion mediated by price setting software (RealPage Yield Star).

3) The appearance of “mega landlords” that control a meaningful share of supply in a metro.

At the end of the day, having the option to rent instead of own is one I think we want to have in our society, for reasons of mobility, risk aversion, etc. That necessitates the existence of either public housing, or landlords.

We can argue about the lesser of two evils, but in my mind it’s probably landlords, hopefully with some substantial regulation reform to eliminate opportunities for price fixing.

Are you saying that there is massive numbers of empty housing stock in areas in high demand?

Because when there are 15 people wanting to live somewhere and only 10 places, then the lowest the price will go is higher than 5 people are able/willing to pay.

If not, then you need to ration the housing in some other means. What would you prefer? Nepotism? Lottery? Sexual Favours?

> the cost of housing / rent / owning a house has gone up

Not due to landlords, it's because the amount that people can pay for housing has increased -- higher wages, more multiple-earner households, easier credit, secondary income sources, investment gains. Plus there are more "households" competing for the limited number of available housing units.

> Landlords are part of the problem though; due to landlords, property managers, investors, etc, the cost of housing / rent / owning a house has gone up, meaning that a job that would get you a decent apartment 20, 30 years ago is no longer enough.

I mean this is one of the few spaces that every economist agrees on the biggest factors in causing housing to become unaffordable are rent control and construction bureaucracy (zoning, environmental reviews, etc).

Not to mention crime like theft, fraud, burglaries. But yes, a perpetual underclass has giant negative externalities. The status quo is deeply ingrained to the American psyche - the risk of someone taking advantage of handouts trumps all other concerns.

Not having public bathrooms, but clean up shit from the streets. Not having preventative health care, but still providing legally mandated ambulance rides and critical care. Letting poor people who get an unexpected expense (say medical or car breaks down) fall into unemployment, homelessness and crime or – costliest of all – the prison industrial complex.

Paying the bill isn’t the problem. People are happy to overspend public funds, so this isn’t related to small government or just general tax aversion. The problem is simply that someone might get something they didn’t deserve. So in a perverted way, it’s a kind of a moralistic obsession with fairness.