Credit Unions are better also because they are literally libertarian socialism. Imagine Uber with no shareholder class - as a cooperative, and so on. No one to extract rents from the two sides of the marketplace, the people themselves own the network.
So are housing cooperatives. They have low rent because there is no landlord class. Look at the Mitchell-Lama program in NYC, 30 years later they the most desirable and awesome apartments for the price, all around the city. Meanwhile next door the capitalist landlord-owned buildings are 3x as much for worse amenities.
So yeah, I'm a libertarian socialist. People in the US hear socialism and they think of a big, oppressive government, but actually government is just as much if not more on the side of the capitalist, the industrialist... bailing out large banks and injecting trillions into corporate equity to prop up markets. In the 19th century they actually violently put down strikers, evicted people, operated debtor's prisons etc. which is why most libertarians back then were socialist. It was cool. Today that lefty libertarian stuff is mostly in Europe.
That article at therealdeal has me pretty stunned.
The headline story is that landlords are keeping rent controlled units vacant rather than renovating them which would be unprofitable, and daring the toothless regulators to do something about it. Ok, makes sense.
Then as a side note, the article mentions that they’re also deferring maintenance on whole buildings: roofs, boilers, cameras, etc. The fact that these landlords are incentivized not just to let a few units turn into roach hotels, but to let their whole buildings crumble, without the remaining tenants leaving to a better building - that’s a fundamentally broken market. Way beyond a few rent controlled units.
So are housing cooperatives. They have low rent because there is no landlord class. Look at the Mitchell-Lama program in NYC, 30 years later they the most desirable and awesome apartments for the price, all around the city. Meanwhile next door the capitalist landlord-owned buildings are 3x as much for worse amenities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell%E2%80%93Lama_Housing_...
The democratically-run city tries to fix this with rent control, but it's only some housing, and just a few mins ago we learned this:
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-rgb-preliminary-vote...
Plus the government is notoriously bad at getting even the simplest stuff done:
https://therealdeal.com/magazine/national-july-2022/that-emp...
So yeah, I'm a libertarian socialist. People in the US hear socialism and they think of a big, oppressive government, but actually government is just as much if not more on the side of the capitalist, the industrialist... bailing out large banks and injecting trillions into corporate equity to prop up markets. In the 19th century they actually violently put down strikers, evicted people, operated debtor's prisons etc. which is why most libertarians back then were socialist. It was cool. Today that lefty libertarian stuff is mostly in Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_Man_Under_Socialis...
There are very few famous lefty libertarians today, people like George Carlin and Russel Brand maybe.