this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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My landlord is actually a community nonprofit group that owns several units in our neighborhood. They do rent for the most part based on income. I forget the exact breakdowns but iirc it's capped on the upper end at an actually reasonable percentage of your income so you're not paying most of your paycheck to rent. Then my wife and I are on the low end because we're on a fixed income. Before we got approved for section 8 we paid their lowest flat rate which is basically just enough to cover property taxes and maintenance which iirc percentage wise was a higher percentage of our income than their normal rate is but it still wasn't crazy for us.
Then they use the excess to do things like update the units to make them more energy efficient, community organizing, etc. They've also bought out a couple of abandoned houses in the area and redeveloped them so people can actually live in them.
I personally don't have a problem with landlords per se. Not everybody wants to own a home and deal with all of the maintenance and things that go along with it. I don't even necessarily have a problem with them getting paid to deal those things. What I personally have a problem with is housing being used as ~~passive income~~a free money cheat.
That sounds exactly like a housing co-op, you're usually part landlord in that situation as a member of that community (much like electric co-ops and worker owned business co-ops). They are by far the best type of situation for people who don't want to take on the full responsibility of "owning" the house themselves as it's spread out between all the members and the "agreement" usually is a 100 year contract. If it's through the government strictly with subsidies etc I guess it's more of socialized housing, either way those two don't fit the description of a profit driven landlord that OP was suggesting above.
The only other form of housing that I think is legitimate in our dystopian future is Rent to Own where all rent is collected into an account which will purchase the house at a contracted set price (maybe add negotiations for remodeling etc but with outside mediators so no one is getting bamboozled). If you don't want to help someone get into permanent housing, then don't buy additional properties.
I don't know if it qualifies as a cooperative. I know they're a nonprofit and they've got a board that we can just join for some fairly cheap dues even for our fixed income. My wife was actually on it for a while before our twins were born.