>>>I wish the same could be said of the people that are going to be beholden to wage slavery to rent the residence that you own and they get nothing out of at the end of their leases.

Almost every urban development thread on HN is full of comments about how Americans need to abandon the idea of single-family home ownership and move into apartments. How is renting out a SFH any different from a small-time landlord than owns a property with 10 tenants? Either way the inhabitants leave the relationship with no change in their ownership of the underlying physical land.

>>>But you're okay contributing to making America more of a hellhole for others?

Middle-class rental property owners aren't even on my Top100 list of Things Making America a Hellhole.

>>>If you don't reside in the US, and you have no intention of living in the US, nor having your family live there, but you own property that you extract rent on, you are the EXACT problem that people complain about.

You've basically just described "Foreign Investment". Renting property is protection from the elements, without the long-term financial risk of a mortgage. Likewise, working a job is a means to generate income, either in the absence of accumulated capital (for starting your own business), or when the laborer is unwilling to risk their own capital. So if renting out our family home is apparently immoral, is it also immoral to open a factory and employ American workers, while I live overseas? In both cases I am levering my possession of private property, which I am not personally using, to amplify the accrual of wealth to myself. I'm considering sub-dividing my property and building 1-2 additional houses on the currently-unused land. If zoning weren't an issue, I could tear down the existing home and replace it with a 3-unit apartment building. Would I still be "the exact problem" if I now owned a luxury condo building instead of 3 single-family units?

>>>How about you sell your US properties and buy ones where you live?

My US property is severely undervalued because it is in a historically-black neighborhood with a poor-performing school system. I was quoted a sale price of ~$275k....while houses barely 1.5km away in the white neighborhoods, with fewer physical features/amenities than our home, are selling for $450k. If I ever sell it at all, it will be after the neighborhood sufficiently gentrifies and home prices normalize with the surrounds. As for buying a home here (Japan), why would I undergo all the various transaction costs involved (FX risk, agent commissions, etc...) just to physically shift the source of my revenue? With the current exchange rates, it's more advantageous in purchasing-power terms to collect an income in USD, and spend JPY. It's also generally a better risk-management strategy to hold physical assets during periods of high inflation (like now), so I wouldn't want to sell the US house and just sit on the cash either. So if I bought a house here, I would lose on the transaction costs, gain nothing in nominal wealth (break even on house price), lose qualitatively on the physical features (you're not getting a 4-bedroom house with an inground pool for $400k in Japan), and lose on purchasing-power-parity of my rental income.

>>>Those 'do-gooders' that you complain about, may be wrong, but they're trying to better the situation. You seem to content to shit all over it instead. That makes you no better than said 'do-gooders' and if anything quantifiably worse.

Yes, because all too frequently, doing something is objectively worse than doing nothing. I've seen it a million times in the military: new officers come in, always trying to shake up the status quo and "improve" things....but they have a terribly limited understanding of the depth of the organization's problems...so they force us to implement poorly-thought-out adjustments to our business practices. Then they are out the door to another office barely 1 year later. The constant churn of bad ideas leaves the organization unable to build institutional proficiency, worse than if we had just stuck with one set of mediocre solutions for ~5 years instead.

So when someone suggests that the solution to America's housing problem is "get the central government to seize and redistribute private property", I absolutely consider my position quantifiably better than their suggestion.