No Stupid Questions

I'd say the only ethical way to be a residential landlord is if you are renting out the only house you own because you aren't in a position to use it as a house - say you've brought a house, but had to move somewhere for a few years for work and intend to move back at some point.

The moment you own 2 houses, you are profiting from a system that only works because of inelastic demand - you could have put your money into the stock market and made it do something productive, but instead you are collecting rent, making it harder for others to meet their own basic needs, and profiting from a speculative bubble

Well done OP

My dad was a 'landlord' renting out the other three rooms of the house to people. He kept the rent a few hundred bwlow the market because all the rent money was icing on his cake, and he knew housing was hard to come by. Most renters liked him, but he was a poor judge of character and would often give the room to the first person that showed up, leading to drama, but mostly a good experience.

Here's the thing: landlords make a profit, right? Where does that profit come from? There are better and worse landlords, but any time there's a profit there's money being taken away from people.

No one is coming after your aunt, but that's where it comes from. They're leaching money away from tenants. Some are worse than others, but it is by definition parasitic if you're making a profit and not providing a service.

This also goes for owning a home bigger than you need. A single person in a three bedroom house just because they have the money deprives families from getting housing at affordable prices. Lifestyle inflation consumes valid and useful housing that could be used for the un~housed.

Any property left vacant can be claimed by squatters rights and in some places that can start as soon as 28 days. It's going to be state by state but if there is an extra home you see vacant you can just start living in it and once you hit a certain duration of stay it could be yours.

As an sp member in the UK I can give you the parties stance. We aren't going after small business. Your aunt while not giving to society and being a member of the owning class is more a symptom of capitalism and under a socialist programme she would not need to degrade others to live a fulfilling life. Dignity should be afforded to all but we also understand that material conditions govern us.

We go after bigger issues than your aunt.

if you have one for any longer than a year or two after moving from your rental property to your current home, yeah that's parasitic. if you don't need it sell it and give someone a chance to buy instead of rent.

It's complicated, for me personally having one or two extra properties you're providing a service, not everyone wants to buy a house at every moment, e.g. I recently moved to another city and wanted to live in a neighborhood for a while before buying something. The more you have, the more part of the problem you become, because when someone wants to buy somewhere they now can't because people own it for renting. Also, again personally, if the value of rent is higher than the value of the mortgage, then you're ripping people off, because you're essentially buying the house with their money while they can't buy a place of their own. As an example, I want to buy a place of my own, but every place here is so expensive because people buy them to rent, because the rent is higher than the mortgage so if you have the initial money buying a house is essentially free money, however rent is so high that getting the initial money is really hard and people are stuck with paying more to own nothing.

Making money from merely owning things that others need and have to pay you to use as they can't get them otherwise (because you and people like you took them first) - something know in Economics as rent seeking, though it doesn't apply only to housing - is pure parasitism because that person is producing no value whatsoever, merely extorting money from others because they removed free access to a resource from them.

Individual landlords can be the worst ones. Here’s what that often looks like:

1. individual inherits a home
2. they rent it out and quit their job
3. the rent is their only income so they are really cheap about maintenance and repairs
4. they make any repair the tenant’s “fault” and force them to pay for it
5. they raise the rent at every opportunity to the maximum the market will bear, because that is the only way their own income ever rises
6. they do repairs and maintenance themselves, even though they are unskilled, because that’s cheaper, and the quality of all the work is poor, using the cheapest materials possible (I once had a landlord paint our house puke orange because she got a deal on that awful paint).

Meta commentary: note that "LEFTISTS" are not this bloc that is perfectly aligned. You need to ask the individuals whether they hate small scale as well as large scale landlords.

There is no universal "LEFTIST" belief. People exist at every point along the spectrum. Stop thinking in binary terms and you can have far more productive discussions with people.