The vast majority of landlords are not building to supply, they are taking existing supply off the market and in doing so pushing up prices, forcing many to rent. One of the biggest issues in many western cities is not paying the mortgage but affording the deposit.
Landlords now who are making money bought in cheap 10 or 15 years ago. For them it's money for old rope.
MMM bought at least 5 years ago. He's full of it, suggesting things that save a few bucks here and there when he is taking a slice of the labour of 3 families.
What you call taking a slice of labor, I call providing shelter. That slice of labor is going to go to housing expenses one way or another.
House prices and rent are linked. Higher house prices demand higher rent to make the investment worthwhile for the landlord. High house prices provide a floor on rent (otherwise, landlords sell and the rental pool shrinks).
Higher rents provide a floor on house prices (when monthly rent rises to more than about 1% of purchase price, it becomes attractive to buy property to rent in areas without insane taxes).
What's common about both those upward pressures? That they are driven by the demand for housing units (of either sort) by people who want to live in a given area.
More people? More demand. More demand? Higher prices.
I have no connection whatsoever to MMM (other than generally agreeing with a lightweight version of his frugal teachings). I don't see how his being a landlord has any bearing on whether his general information is valuable or not.
House prices are set by credit availability. Rents are set by wages. I'm not agreeing with anything you are saying here and I don't want to waste more time on it. You seem to think it's simply market pressures which I think is naive.
Taken to the extreme exploiting land monopoly isn't "providing shelter" any more than serfdom landlords provided shelter. They extracted labour at state gun point if necessary.
We have a very extreme situation now dating back to pre 2008 when the banks went utterly wild.
House prices are indeed influenced by credit availability (and prevailing local wages, housing supply, housing demand, property taxes, purchase alternatives [like renting], school quality, and many other factors).
Rent is likewise a balance of many factors, including wages but also interest rates, house prices, rental supply, rental demand, property taxes, and other factors.
I'm not sure what you propose as a workable alternative. Banning renting of housing? Government dictated housing prices? Banning real property ownership? Something else?
Buying a house and renting it out is not a land monopoly in any meaningful sense of that phrase; otherwise, I'd have a "monopoly" on the shirt I'm wearing right now.
I prefer to have control over who lives in my residence (that's the same now as an "owner" (mortgagee) as when I was a tenant/renter). I assume most other people also desire that.
In order to accomplish that, we have a notion of property rights (the right to exclusive control of [including the right to exclude others from] the housing unit) and we allow those rights to be permanently or temporarily traded to others in exchange for money or other consideration.
Unless you don't care who lives in your housing unit from day to day, there's got to be some kind of property right in real property and a derivative right-to-exclude. If you want to call the right I have to my own house a monopoly on that particular property, you're technically right (the best kind of right). By that same argument, the corner gas station has a monopoly on selling the specific gasoline contained in its underground tank.
Land is indeed finite. That's one of the properties that makes it valuable.
Landlords now who are making money bought in cheap 10 or 15 years ago. For them it's money for old rope.
MMM bought at least 5 years ago. He's full of it, suggesting things that save a few bucks here and there when he is taking a slice of the labour of 3 families.