I have a friend who buys apartment complexes and houses on the company for his employees to live in; that seems not to be reasonable. In fact, it became more reasonable with wfh; now his colleagues living farther away, who he wants in the office 3 months a year, can live for cheap for both sides and without any long term contracts. Definitely cheaper and more convenient than hotels in his area.
>I have a friend who buys apartment complexes and houses on the company for his employees to live in
When railroad and heavy industry did this exact thing in the 19th century we called them robber barons and broke up their obscenely powerful and corrupt monopolies via antitrust legislation.
Anything can be abused, but I don't know the history; I have heard of robber barons, but not in the context of housing and Google doesn't seem to give me more than just their own enormous mansions. It would depend on if it's abused or not, wouldn't it?
The TL;DR of why this is bad is that when employees are paying, or are indebted to, their employers, even in a roundabout way, it's really easy for that relationship to become very abusive.
The company towns also often payed in scrip, which was basically credit at the company store, and, gee, wouldn't you know it, the company owns all the land to the horizon, so there are no other stores in reasonable travel distance! And if you need a little credit because your pay's terrible after your rent (to the company) comes out, and the prices at the store are marked way up, why, they'll be happy to extend some....
That's the extreme version, but it's bad enough that even inching that direction is something worthy of concern. One ought be wary any time money's flowing from an employee to an employer.
The robber-baron version is basically the thing you see in capitalist-dystopia sci fi like The Outer Worlds, but it actually happened.
>The robber-baron version is basically the thing you see in capitalist-dystopia sci fi like The Outer Worlds, but it actually happened.
Also a significant portion of the country seems to be actively attempting to let it happen again. High school made them read The Great Gatsby and they all imagine themselves as Gatsby and the other obscenely wealthy people instead of the 99% of awful and perpetually dying lives most people experienced.
I am trying to imagine how such a proscription would work. Would there be a list of things corporations are disallowed ownership? Who would the seller be required to determine if the entity is appropriate? Or would the local property tax clerk just not allow registration by a non-human entity?
I am wondering about the details. Would you prohibit anything that could be used as a residence? Office buildings would be permitted? I live in an apartment unit in a 24 story tower. It is owned by a corporation and I lease it. Would only condos owned by humans be permitted?
Do you suppose laws and the legal system provide the social infrastructure to support the corporate ownership of housing as property? If so, that - outside of political will - can be modified, deleted even. Without legal support, it will collapse.
I currently lease my apartment unit in a 24 story tower from a corporation. My friend leases a single family home in a suburb from a corporation. Should both of these use cases be eliminated?
Does it matter that you lease it specifically from a corporation? I'm just going to guess that you are more interested in where any how you live than what the ownership model is of the place your living. For example given two properties in all ways equal except ownership models, you would take the corporate-owned one? I find that a bit far fetched.
Even then, because we typically lack experience with a variety of ownership models, it will be difficult to dis-entangle the familiarity bias from our conceptualizations.
No, I don’t want a corporation. I am trying to imagine how renting would work in dense cities with restrictions on ownership. It seems it would be a less liquid market.
Most of those are bad; at least if a landlord is only interested in money they’ll take your money. In the “decommodified” forms, you can’t live there unless the manager personally likes you.
With government public housing you can lose it if you break the law (hope you never smoke weed) or if the populace elects a racist government and you’re a minority.
Commodifying housing helped black people in the South because they could actually buy prefab houses from Sears.
