Yeah hey maybe the issue is less that every landlord is purposefully an evil leech slumlord and more that the entire system that creates and encourages this arrangement is fundamentally busted. https://twitter.com/FiveThirtyEight/status/1262386242521575428

Also the dude in that story owns a 3-story house he's going to fit himself and 2 units in and he rents out a second car for Uber drivers. Guy has based his entire income on being a textbook capitalist so idk what else to say. It breaks down quickly.

The article is another one of the endless But I'm A Nice Capitalist pieces, which during the current crisis in particular is just gross. There are half a dozen people mentioned in that story, but the capitalist is the victim, not the others who own no property they've monetized.

This is the landlord version of that NPR coffee shop story from a few weeks ago.

The focus on the individual virtue of capitalists is a way of diverting focus from the horrors of the system that creates them, regardless of how nice or how pushed into a corner they are. It's not super relevant when we're talking about something larger than them.

How could capitalism be fundamentally unjust? Look at this nice capitalist, would a sweet person who relies on their capital to live be involved in something unjust?

Anyway good morning

Tl;dr- there are plenty of personally nice landlords, bosses, etc. But the system that creates and sustains these positions is unjust. Uncoupling the personal attributes of the person from that situation is core to having any sort of clarity, and we're taught to do the opposite.