So, just over $3kpa each. Not a lot. It only sounds like he's profiting a lot because nobody would do that unless at scale - i.e. have 131 of them.
At those margins (I don't know what the costs are, but with that little annual profit per trailer it really doesn't matter) there would be no reason to not want the poverty-stricken to have more money, other than perhaps an unwillingness to change business model. The profit margin is just _so_ much greater on more expensive properties.
With 131 properties she probably also has an employee or two to help her manage and repair them.
My main problem is I just don't see what the alternative is. Any rental housing needs to be minimally profitable or no one will bother providing it. That applies at all ends of the pricing spectrum. So if a profit can't even be made, what is the alternative? Millions of people homeless because there are no properties rentable at a price they can afford?
You don't see any alternatives because you are not challenging the premise of private property enforced by a state. That is a very strong assumption that precludes most possibilities. And state property is just a degenerate form of private property where one entity owns everything.
So what exactly are you proposing then? If no one can own anything then the best available will be little more than tents; think nomadic hunter-gatherer societies.
How about you answer one of my questions before you ask me yet another one. What exactly are you proposing if neither people nor government are allowed to own property? I'm not aware of any such scheme in all of modern civilization. The onus is on you to explain.
I think that's a very open ended question, but a very good scholarly source describing alternative systems to governing resources that isn't too radical but is also substantially different from privatization and market systems is "Governing the Commons" by Elinor Ostrom. She's got a Nobel prize in economics if that lends her work any credibility.
Land-Value Tax. Landlord makes money by improving the land and providing services to residents, not by merely owning land in perpetuity. Land is common wealth.
So I'll admit that personally I'm intrigued by land-value tax, but it's not an answer to the other guy's question. He was precluding all public and private land ownership. There can't be taxes on land of any kind if no one owns anything and no ownership is enforced.
There wouldn't be any shelters on unowned land because it would be foolish to improve it if anyone could take your improvements from you at a moment's notice. Now you need a government to enforce exclusive use of the land by a given person, and guess what, that's ownership.
If something can be stolen from you, then you own it. You're trying to have it both ways by playing with semantics.
A land value tax charges taxes for owning land. Now you're saying that it wouldn't be taxes on the land, but rather, taxes on improvements. Then it's no longer a land value tax at all then. The whole point of a land-value tax is that the tax reflects the potential value of the land, regardless of any improvements that might be on it, e.g. the Empire State Building or a flat parking lot would owe the same amount of LVT in midtown Manhattan. What you are proposing is a regular property tax, which does take improvements into account.
I didn't say the shelter was being taxed for value. The shelter is on land. You pay taxes on the land. Ergo, you're paying taxes for the shelter. The only reason you'll probably want to continue paying taxes on the land is because you have a shelter there.
>If something can be stolen from you, then you own it.
Right, you have been grant the right to use the land as long as you pay the taxes, which you may or may not have built a shelter on. You also own the shelter. You don't own the land.
So you're proposing the exact same system that we have now, working in the same way, except that you aren't calling it ownership for some reason, even though being granted the exclusive right to use land by the governemnt, and paying taxes on said land, is what ownership is.
I just don't think that you've thought any of this through, or that you have a coherent image in your mind as to what you're proposing, or how it's different in any way from the status quo.
At those margins (I don't know what the costs are, but with that little annual profit per trailer it really doesn't matter) there would be no reason to not want the poverty-stricken to have more money, other than perhaps an unwillingness to change business model. The profit margin is just _so_ much greater on more expensive properties.