A landlord is a landlord, regardless of the particular lease terms. In general, they aren’t automatically good or bad. They’re just people acting as rationally as anyone else with respect to their material conditions and interests.

If you’re asking why they get a bad reputation, I think that’s also pretty straight forward:

• Almost everyone has had or knows someone who’s had to deal with an especially neglectful or difficult landlord;
• landlords have been engaging in notoriously greedy and abusive behavior since the industrial revolution;
• landlords aren’t doing themselves any favors they way some of them publicly brag and whine about being landlords;
• and there’s just something that isn’t right about owning someone else’s home and probably everyone has some faint sense of that.

Personally, I don’t think that landlords should be guillotined, but housing policy that’s accommodating to them is bad policy. We should be strengthening tenant protections and building new housing to the point that private landlords become practically obsolete.

Do you own a residential home for a purpose other than you or your family living in it? You’re a landlord.

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 incomea free money cheat.

There’s way too much money in the hands of the wealthy. What are they going to do with it all? Invest in the stock market. All the good investments are overvalued. All the bad investments are have been saturated too. What else can they do with all of that money. They gotta put it somewhere.

So they put excess money into real estate. So the price of real estate has been driven up so much that it’s over valued like any other avenue of investment.

The stock prices being overvalued isn’t good but isn’t something that’ll affect regular people. But their real estate investments being over valued? Well that real estate isn’t an investment to someone that simply needs a place to live.

And that’s the problem, the price of housing is priced above what the people what people outside of the investor class can afford. And the investor class wants a return on their investment in the overprices real estate (that they collectively drove the price up on) so charge a lot for rent. Of course maybe if people moved to another area that would put downward pressure on the rent prices. But AirBnB is there so if this happens they can still get income from that when no one can afford the insanely high rent.

So the overarching problem is the wealthy have wayyy too much money and are dumping their excess wealth into real estate and pricing people that just need a place to live out of the market. AirBnB isn’t the cause of the problem but it makes the problem worse.

One of many problems caused by the unwillingness to simply tax the wealthy.

Is your Airbnb a spare part of your primary home, or a money making scheme that exploits housing somebody else could live in?

Deserving of the guillotine? What? This question doesn’t feel sincere, and I wonder whether you’re really going to be trying to understand other people’s reasoning. I’ll bite though. We have enough homes for everyone to have their own home, but a very large number of people rent or are homeless. Big corporations buy up all the property and convert it to rentals so even those who can afford to buy property have a very hard time finding anything, and what’s available has jacked up prices. We’re talking people like blackrock. THOSE people can burn in hell, those people are taking advantage of every single person who rents from them. It’s a scale, you know. Blackrock is evil - my grandpa who rents out his old house is not, even if I disagree with the fact that he’s renting at all. Charging someone enough to pay the mortgage and give you a paycheck is well… I mean it’s demanding more money than what the property is worth from someone. They’d be better off without you there as a middle-man. At best you’re taking advantage of a small number of people, at worst you’re literally blackrock. There’s no reason a single person should not have their own home, because we already have enough homes to go around.

It’s a really easy definition for me. Do you acquire recurring income from a residential location that you don’t personally live at? You get the French haircut.

Owning a home and having roommates that share the mortgage is fine. Putting your guest bedroom on Airbnb is fine. Owning an apartment building and living in one of the units and actually providing labor to contribute to the running of the apartment building (whether through maintenance or office work), perfectly ok.

With that being said, when it comes time for the guillotine, we’ll start with the corporate landlords to give the “mom and pop” landlords time to come to their senses.

Edit: explaining my reasoning: Passive income is theft. Owning things is not a job. Humans have a right to live by nature of being alive, profiting off of a human right is evil.

Needs socialised and subsidized; food, water, shelter, healthcare for example

Wants, not socialised

An example?

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-social-housing-secret-how-vienna-became-the-worlds-most-livable-city

If they ever owned any land, they get guillotined twice. Reasoning: ultraleftism hasn’t worked so far, so clearly we haven’t gone ultraleft enough yet

I absolutely despise airbnb owners, they drive housing and renting houses to the clouds in whichever areas they operate. Extra guillotine for you.

People extorting money due to the finite nature of land, for the sole reason of having been born with better access to capital.

It’s just making money, due to having money. They didn’t invent anything, they didnt discover and invest in an emerging company. They didn’t do anything innovative or clever. Anyone born to wealth could have done it. Which is why those are, by far and away, the vast majority of landlords.

Even a Conservative, union busting aristocrat like Churchill knew how bad landlordism was and landlords have been hated throughout all of human history. It’s only the current neoliberal plague who’ve attempted to moralise it with rich people worship and bootstrap paradoxes.