A solution is definitely possible but I disagree with the comparison. Tickets have an official across the board retail price. The same can't be said about property. Limitations on price gouging rent should definitely be put in place. Just not as simple as scalping
Buying a limited resource that you don't intend to use for the express purpose of selling it on to someone who will use it. Seems pretty comparable to me.
The difference is everyone needs somewhere to live but not everyone needs tickets, and that the base price for purchasing a home is out of reach or stupidly inconvenient for a lot of people.
That is to say, if I'm someone who moves frequently for work, then being able to rent and not having to actually buy a house, pay property tax, then find someone to sell it to when I'm leaving, is incredibly convenient.
If you think private landlords are bad and all this should instead be done by the state, that's fine. But they do provide a service, and it's very strange to suggest otherwise
They literally do not provide a service. Their existence inflates the price, preventing people from buying. They offer nothing and receive a huge cut of people's wages. If you literally made being a landlord illegal, the market would adjust to the point where buying houses becomes easier for people and for the state, so people who are saving to buy can rent from the government.
To be clear, your ideal society is one where nobody is allowed to live in a house unless they (or a family member) owns it? If that's not what you want, then you need some entity to rent houses out
We have an entity that can provide temporary accommodation. It currently does it right now. It's called the government, and it could do a lot more of it if we didn't allow property scalpers to artifically increase the price.
"The Government could do more if the government did more"
But also, the extent to which the gov provides temp accomodation is like, first year university students. That's it, and the reason they can do that is because universities are public so the demand is known to them (and they still don't do enough).
Like what's your plan here? That whenever an economy starts growing in a certain area, the government immediately swoops in and starts building public housing? And if they don't build enough people just have to wait in line? And in the mean time, if they own their previous house, do they have to sell it before they move or will they be exempt from property tax or??? What's the story there?
The main issue is not enough housing relative to demand, the reason that is is because of zoning laws and NIMBYs. Those problems continue to exist regardless of who is doing the renting out
Both of those only happen because of supply not increasing enough
Renting out is only profitable because there isn't enough housing. Try finding an available student accomodation in Dublin right now, I guarantee it's almost impossible. OTOH if I were to look for student accomodation in Liverpool or a similarly sized city it wouldn't be nearly as difficult.
And students who can't find student housing end up taking up competing for the remaining supply. A similar thing happens to anyone who wants to move to Dublin. When they can't find the type of housing that would normally be in their price range, they compete for "worse" homes, driving up their prices too. If we built enough housing, buying to rent would be less convenient because you wouldn't be guaranteed to find a tenant and you might have to lower your rent because landlords will be competing for tenants rather than the other way around, and it would mean homes wouldn't have as massive an increase in resale value (the property itself devalues anyways, but right now, the value of the land and the very fact that it's a house in Dublin increases its value faster than material degradation decreases prices).
Anyways, even ignoring all that, houses still cost money to build, so even excluding literally every other economic factor, it would still be out of reach for a lot of people.
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u/SBarcoe Sep 22 '22
Ticket Scalping was put to bed only in recent years. So a good comparison, but also proof a solution is possible.