There are a lot of landlords like you - I am fortunate to have one, and I know it and I want to be a good tenant in part for that reason. Their retirement is this house I live in. A big problem is absentee landlords and the extraction of increasing rents from unmaintained properties. It’s the assholes being slumlords at scale who are the problem, and it’s difficult to come up with a way to regulate housing without putting such a burden on small landlords that doesn’t ultimately benefit the better capitalized, better lawyered-up corporate types.

I sympathize in part because this was an idea my mom and I had shared for her own retirement, in a three family with a tenant occupying one unit. But the market over the last few years has made that look less feasible in part because of big corporate firms buying up three family and other small rental properties and driving up the prices of what’s left. The same actors who are profiting from substandard housing are profiting from jacked up rents.