If you can't afford to maintain a house you are renting out then you shouldn't be a landlord. Your friends could just as easily sell the house to a family and invest in a way that doesn't require them to maintain an asset they cannot afford, but instead they choose to keep it and profit as much as they can. Landlords are assholes.
This view kinda confuses me, I'm not a landlord don't worry! If people can't afford a house then what are they expected to do? It's all well and good saying if you can't afford the repairs then you shouldn't be a landlord but if you can't afford a house, what then, does the same sentiment apply?
It seems to me it's very much a problem with the 'system' . Aiming your hate at landlords in general makes no sense when they aren't the reason you don't own a house in the first place. Obviously some people do take advantage of others, that's not what I mean.
What is the solution here?
If I could wave a magic wand, I'd limit the number of houses people could own and how much wealth any 1 person could have...
But the problem still stands, people need enough money to get a house in the first place... So how does that work?
Aiming your hate at landlords in general makes no sense when they aren’t the reason you don’t own a house in the first place.
They are, in some cases, the reason people don't own houses. Not in every case of course, but certainly in some. I think there have even been "rent-to-own" scams by some landlords.
I honestly don't know what the landscape would look like without landlords, but that's not a prerequisite to hating on and moaning about greedy landlords and their greedy ways.
Landlords were not a problem 30 years ago and suddenly, they are.
The problem is not landlord. Removing landlords won't magically fix everything for you. This view is radical and unproductive. This will lead the community no where near a real solution to this crisis.
Removing landlords won’t magically fix everything for you.
Funny that, because I bought a condo and removed landlords from my life and it did actually fix everything for me.
The problem isn't just the landlords, it's a regulatory and policy environment that has shifted since Reagan toward the well off at the expense of everyone else in just about every facet of life including housing. People are pissed at this point because it's completely unaffordable to live while some of you (I'm going to assume you're a landlord because of your tone) are hording tons of houses to profit off of.
No, they were problems 30 years ago, too; it was just masked by other factors. Don't confuse your lack of awareness of a position with that position's nonexistence.