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Why we should get rid of corporate landlords, and an easy method.
Richard Stallman
2021-08-10
Big companies that own rental dwellings are foaming at the mouth with
eagerness to evict tenants that would become homeless.
Given that individual owners can also evict tenants, why is it worse
when the landlord is a big company? The company has more lobbying
power and will use it in favor of laws and policies that drive rents
up. Individual landlords can't do much of that.
One way to break up companies that own many dwellings is to multiply
the real estate tax by a factor that depends on the total dwelling
square footage that the company (including related companies, with
overlapping directors or shareholders) owns anywhere in the world. If
the company owns a hundred dwellings (let's assume for simplicity that
their sizes are comparable), its multiplicative factor might rise to 3
or 4.
States could require landlords to report on their other holdings,
and penalize any omission.
This is an adaptation of Fixing ‘too-big-to-fail’
Copyright (c) 2021 Richard Stallman
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