My parents rent out a room to a traveling nurse since my brothers and I moved out, the space was just going to waste. I'm not positive on what she pays, but I think it's around $500.

My parents and grandparents own rent houses. They're active property managers. Most fixes they do themselves. My summers growing up were working on them.

I think the difference between what they do and the corporate owned apartment I'm staying in is the "personal touch" (for lack of a better term). When the owners have never even seen the property, they see renters as numbers on paper instead of people.

I work in real estate, but I don't hate landlords or rent. I hate the idea that landlording is a job somehow.

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of landlords.

My landlord is an old lady who owns a series of apartment complexes. I assume she is quite wealthy, but the reason I don't take issue with the situation is because she keeps up the property instead of paying a property management firm to do it. She also isn't hoarding complexes or single family homes, she owns a couple, and managing a couple of complexes with a few people under you is a full time job.

The other kind is the people I work with. Fuck them. The property owners we work with are billionaires. They own hundreds or thousands of complexes and god knows how many single family homes. They also don't do anything. They buy a complex from a builder, then they pay a property management firm to run it. All they're doing is skimming excess rent in exchange for assuming the liability of owning the complex. Except they're not even doing that, because everything is insured.

The first kind of people are wealthy, yes, but they work for a living. The second kind do not actually do anything. If we killed them all tomorrow and gave the complexes they own to property management firms or individual managers, nothing would change.

I am a reluctant landlord. If I had my way, I wouldn't have any properties other people lived in, but alas there are other factors at play. I'm a renter myself, and hope to buy a house soon, but the properties that my family has dog me still.

I do not think having an AirBNB or any BNB counts, as those are temporary arrangements similar to a hotel. They can also make good use of a property that normally would not be in use. One of my friends is a musician, she lives half of the time in Nashville, because recording studios and producers, and half of her time in Montana where she’s from. Whatever house she’s not living in at the time gets rented out as an AirBNB. I would consider that acceptable, she’s actually using both places, and when she’s not in one, she’s putting it to good use.

In my eyes a landlord is someone who sits on a property, maybe maintains it, maybe not, and makes someone else pay their bills.

I’m lucky enough to own my own place, but one of my coworkers is paying what I pay for my mortgage in rent every month, and he has less space than I do. What is his landlord doing to get a $1800 check every month? Absolutely nothing. That’s not OK. At least apartment buildings typically have amenities. Don’t get me wrong I’m still not a fan of apartment buildings, but they can be done right, they just usually aren’t.

landlords are an unfortunate product of a system that has made it impossible for a normal person to buy a place to live or at least settle on unoccupied land.

you can choose not to be a landlord for ethical reasons, but they will exist as long as people have to rent.

If they ever owned any land, they get guillotined twice. Reasoning: ultraleftism hasn't worked so far, so clearly we haven't gone ultraleft enough yet