Same way the Soviets did, making sure every registered resident has a home. If they don't own one, they get one assigned. All housing not designed as single family or recreational/vacation housing is owned collectively, Either by the state or a resident's co-op.
Sure, you'll have short term stays and rented out holiday dachas and people living in another city than their registered accommodation etc, but then it's less landlord and more hotel manager.
the maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry
The issue is ownership of property that you're not living in. Even now in the West property ownership is restricted and difficult - just eliminate the option of owning multiple properties.
I like this, but also housing co-ops and community land trusts would seemingly be useful in the transition away from renting. I feel like there needs to be some path to ownership for people who might not be able to purchase one the usual way for whatever reason.
How would you prevent one person or company having a subsidiary for every property?
If you require that everything be owner-occupied, does that mean you can't leave your house for a few years to live somewhere else, and have someone else live in your house?
If you live somewhere else for a few years, and someone else is living in your house, you are a landlord unless you're letting them stay there for free.
Depending on how hard they are on your house, they're doing you a service just living there, making sure the roof doesn't start leaking or what have you.
And if they do ruin your house, well, you could probably seek damages somehow.
Well, companies have no need to own a residence in this situation. Also, primary residences are already treated differently in ownership rules and tax laws, so the difference is already there. Just prevent people from owning multiple houses.
see that's the thing, it's always going to come down to a insurrection against the state to fight private property 'rights', at which point lik just declare a commune or a soviet or something you know
A city could use eminent domain to get landlords' property through forced sales (so you'd pay them, but you'd get the buildings). It could then keep some units as public housing that would be rented out at low rates, but the best use of the majority would probably be to sell it off on extremely generous terms. There are all sorts of things that could complicate this, but there's a framework.
Could it be as easy as a law that says “you can’t exchange money for living in a place”?
No. The particular agreements and contracts are not the problem, the distribution of property is. If you do that while leaving the distribution of property the same, you'll just get a lot more homeless people, it's just restricting the options of tenants. Any real solution has to address the distribution of property in some fashion.
I mean it depends on the economic system for one. but broadly speaking, just simply have a community collectivise all private property that is owned by landlord and if you live in a place you rent you now own it, surplus property is managed and distributed by the community as needed
well the thing is that as soon as you try something like even reducing the profits of landlords, they have the power of the state behind them. and if you try to fight that legally then the state will just use violence in the form of the army or the police to protect private property. at which point, if you're now more or less in insurrection against landlords, you may as well go the whole way.
you can't just reform this one small thing away, because it's a whole part of the system of capitalism and private property that the state literally exists to uphold at all costs. so you can't unless you have a revolution basically
Wage a war on the landlord class on every front with the goal of reducing their numbers, properties and profits in every way possible while benefitting public housing, housing coops, land trusts and tenants whenever possible.
Making life miserable for landlords is fairly trivial: rent control, taxes, licensing requirements, building permits, eviction prevention, etc. But you've got to adequately providing housing through your preferred channels then your just causing a housing crisis. Another pitfall of this strategy is that it will affect petit-landlords first and you will be painted as pro big landlord.
Massive public housing is how European social democrats "solved" this problem. Check out Vienna's Karl Marx building. Drop a fuck ton of fresh public housing on the market at well below market rate and you fuck over every landlord in the city and maybe some in the next city over. People will legit try to smear you because the wait list for your new public housing is decades long.
However, it requires holding onto power in some capacity to keep public housing running. Let the bougies take over again and they'll defund and privatize your public housing asap. A slower but more resiliant strategy might be fronting benefits, tax cuts, and deregulating the coops and land trusts. Get the public housing up but also patron the more socialist independent housing organizations and you might stay in power to keep your public housing going.
I'm not sure if you'd need a law against landlordism. Expropriate existing non-owner occupied properties, then make them available for rent at cost or free as a public good. Municipalities would continually build more public housing to keep up with the population. There simply wouldn't be a market for rented property (or not much of one).
the way it was explained to me about cuba (by cubans) is that each person could own a single residence. a corporation or organization cannot own a residence. non-citizens cannot own real property / residences either. so a married couple of cuban nationals could own the place they lived in and rent another place out to vacationers, emigrants, whoever.
if you wanted a place and there was a lot unoccupied, the government would provide you with title and the material to build it (as available, because the embargo fucks with material availability). if someone was selling a place and you wanted to buy it, the government would provide a 0% interest loan for you to buy it from the seller.
if you sold a place, the government took 30% of whatever amount of value it had increased during your ownership.
it all seemed fairly reasonable and incentivized people to take care of places they owned, but prevented psychos from rapidly building wealth through speculating & flipping / hoarding, locked out foreign "investors", and put the breaks on the whole "net present value" growth aspect of debt financing.
The way mao did it, you go around town to town lynching every landlord you find. The only solution is death.
