So what do people do if they need to live somewhere for a couple months or a year due to work, school, medical reasons, while a home is being repaired after disaster, etc?
And don't say hotels because then it's the same thing as an apartment but with a different name.
There has to be some in-between where there is living space available on shorter term basis that isn't just making profit for a landlord.
@Daojoan
@Erzbet @Daojoan
That's where things get more complicated and technical. It would still be very different from our status quo, if every apartment building or hotel at least had an owner who lived on the premises (if not some arrangement of collective ownership with arrangements for temporary stays). We'd have to use some imagination to come up with new ways of handling things, but hardly anyone seems to want to really sit down and consider the possibilities.
A big part of the issue with absentee owners is, you have somebody making decisions about the conditions and upkeep of a place where those conditions have NO IMPACT on them personally. They aren't physically present to experience the leaks or vermin or fire hazards etc. The big corporate landlords never even have to look any neighbors in the eye, they're just off possibly on some other continent owning dozens or even thousands of homes that are nothing but an abstract Monopoly board to them. Even people who have very good intentions are not going to have a great shot at making good decisions about a place they hardly ever see, especially when it has a powerful impact on the lives of people they've never met and whose needs they can't understand. It's a situation inherently prone to corruption, and generally a bad idea.
Anyway, it's weird how these discussions always seem to get derailed onto endless iterations of; but some of us don't waaaaannna have any real control over the places where we live, it's too much icky scary responsibility or whatever, therefore we should just continue allowing a few assholes to keep a huge portion of the population feeling unsafe and unable to so much as make decisions about what color our own damned walls are.
@Erzbet @Daojoan
That's where things get more complicated and technical. It would still be very different from our status quo, if every apartment building or hotel at least had an owner who lived on the premises (if not some arrangement of collective ownership with arrangements for temporary stays). We'd have to use some imagination to come up with new ways of handling things, but hardly anyone seems to want to really sit down and consider the possibilities.