I just saw this post about landlords being parasitic. While I agree in some points - mainly that by owning more property than you need for yourself, you’re driving up the price for others who want to buy a property. However, I don’t want to buy property when I move. I don’t have the funds for it, and I’m happy with a rented flat. Sure I want to get my own property at some point, however I’m also sure I want to move at least two more times in my life. Buying and selling each time sounds like a lot of hassle. Also, I live in a shared flat, that just sounds like a legal nightmare if the ownership changed every time someone moved out. How does this fit together? Are there solutions to this that don’t require landlords to exist?
Coops already exist. Basically they’re already set up so that when people move in, they own part of it, and when they move out, they don’t. The technical legal details of it varies from your country, region, municipality, etc, but from my basic understanding, when you sign your contract, it includes saying “you own this building with us until you move out. We might ask you to move out if you poop in the communal garden.”
Edit: re-reading your post, I realize I’m not sure if you mean the entire building or a single unit, but either way you can have similar arrangements.
Yup. I used to live next to a housing coop. It
wasis (It’s still there, I just don’t live in that city anymore, hence my predispositionfor past tense) the “experimental” neighborhood of the city, so it attracted some rather interesting people as well, but the place was nice and it seemed to work pretty well. I used to walk via there twice a day between daycare and the most convenient bus stop.