here's my hot take, and I truly expect to take heat for this, but WHATEVER. My "better things are not significantly possible any time soon, so we need to deal as best we can" stance is well known.

The actual take I have:

The way of life best suited to averting most major social issues (climate change, social isolation, right wing politics) - urbanism - will not be possible without landlords in the next several decades

I know what everyone's immediately going to say, "but, Ellie, housing COOPERATIVES or government entities can own high rise buildings!" Several responses to this:

1) government is good. That's true. Minus full communism, which ain't happening, all housing won't be gov't owned

2) I am not aware of any banks offering mortgage loans on high rises to cooperatives.

Those are the two, fundamental, practical points: only for profit corporations can build the kind of units most suited for human flourishing right now. BUT ALSO

3) I do not want to live in a collective,cooperative,or any other situation where people are more in my business than they need to be.I want to live in a studio apartment in a high rise and mind my own business.This is most likely to happen with well regulated corporate landowner

A cooperative is going to be prone to the very types of policing and interference with personal life that a corporate landlord avoids. Yes corporations can discriminate, but 1) mostly they're too busy 2) this can be solved with regulation

Even if we could regulate out the collective's ability to police a resident's life, I and a lot of people do not *want* to be "building equity" in a home. I'm absolutely aghast at the prospect of what would have happened to me had I bought a house in NJ when I had a good job.

Renting, when it works properly, gives a person the most freedom within anything remotely resembling the current system, to move around and do as they please. The problems with it are failings of regulation.

On occupant-landlords: I was in this situation once as a renter. I lived with my landlady and several other people around our age. It probably was similar to the collective thing, in some ways, in that people could have gotten in each others' business, but we largely didn't

My landlady took money from me, much less than a corporation would, but I never felt oppressed by her or by my corporate landlords.

Anyway, there are certain idealized systems I can think of that could remove landlords from the equation, but if you think they're remotely plausible in a scenario where our society doesn't 100% burn down, you're just wrong. I suppose they could be implemented at lower scale

Like, just spitballing: everyone who doesn't outright own property pays into a housing trust, or something with a similar name,which is calculated to be able to refund the equivalent of equity if they move. You could set something like that up, but being able to refund is crucial

Like above all else, my worst case scenario would be a situation where I at one point bought in (literally) to the kind of rhetoric getting passed around, and collectively began buying a home through some kind of collective mortgage with two other trans girls, and fell out w them

In this scenario, I own one third of a building I no longer wish to occupy, with co-owners who are actively hostile to me.

Overall, this hardcore anti-landlord sentiment basically only even vaguely makes coherent sense if we're advocating everyone live in the country where housing prices are depressed. You can't own in most dense places without being VERY rich.

And in any case, owning sucks if you're not sure you have a stable job and won't need to move or just get wanderlust. It makes you like my parents, it ties you to one place forever

The idea that housing is a service you pay for is not actually obscene, as long as there are methods for helping people who can't pay (which collective ownership doesn't address directly either). Building equity in a thing isn't, like, a human right.

And fwiw, when you have a marginalized live-in landlord who pays the mortgage with the rent and has minimal left over, what you essentially have is someone leveraging one privilege they have and their tenants don't to compensate for a different privilege they don't have