Imo, what your aunt is doing is okay as long as she doesnt start hoarding more and more houses and acts fairly. There is some value in not having to deal with problems that come with owning apartment but uncertainty of the world burns that value away easily. As landlord you have a duty to take care of your tenants and if you cant do that then you shouldnt be allowed to own property like that.

In an ideal world maybe renting homes would be something that isn't parasitic. But the world isn't ideal, and you end up with housing as investment, which means housing shortages, housing inflation, and housing restrictions.

Yeah, the big landlords are worse, but even the small ones are almost always going to be sucking the blood of their tenants beside because it's a losing proposition from the get-go. Think about it for a second. If your relatives bought those houses as an investment, no matter how nice they are about it, no matter how "fair" their rents, they're part of a bad and broken system, they're profiting off of other people's need for a basic, fundamental thing that can't be escaped.

It isn't like someone that has a big house and rents out a room, which is still kinda parasitic on the far left scale of things because it means they don't need that house in the first place, but let's be fucking real and admit that nobody should be forced to move just because their kids left for college or whatever, and now there's a spare room. The further left you go, the crazier that kind of asinine thing gets, but extremes are gonna extreme, ya dig?

But once you're consolidating property for the sole purpose of charging other people to live there? Yeah, landlords, no matter how nice they may be, are fucking over everyone.

It's like ACAB. Yeah, we all know that some individual police officers are probably not actively fucking people over and such, but they're part of the system, and if they aren't actively working against that system, they're part of the problem too.

Your relatives probably are decent folks that are just trying to get ahead in a capitalist world where that kind of investment is stable and effective. And I can't hate, nor abide hate towards, people that are really just doing the best they can. But they're still parasitic. A medical leech is no less a parasite because it happens to pull a clot out. A mosquito is no less a parasite because it's just trying to make babies. The comparison isn't exactly 1:1 there, but you get me, right?

I don't waste my hate on people like your relatives, I save it for predatory companies until and unless the small fry are assholes alongside being parasites.

But you can't genuinely believe in the more common "left"ideologies without recognizing the flaws of capitalism. When you look at those flaws, you begin to realize that it really doesn't matter what scale things start at, it always gets worse.

Along those lines, let's say your relatives are fucking saints. They do everything right by their tenants, only making enough profit to ensure their older days are safe.

Then they die, as we all will.

Someone inherits those houses. Again, even if they're saints, they didn't do a damn thing to build those homes, they took no risks, did none of the work. So, even if they sell them and abandon being a landlord, they're profiting off of all those years of rent payed in. And if they don't? Do they just run those few places as a landlord? Just continuing to profit off of others, they aren't worse than what came before, but they aren't better

But, at some point, you've got these homes owned by some great-great-great-whatever, and why? At what point is that not parasitic, even when everyone along the line does nothing other than be landlords? And what happens when you run into someone inheriting that isn't a saint. They either expand the empire, or go slum lord, or start abrogating their responsibilities. And you end up with the same kind of situation as the worst landlords.

I'm not saying there aren't benefits to renting as a renter, there are. But when the housing is an investment, rinse benefits start disappearing fast because that's how it works. At some point, to realize that investment, either rent goes up, or the place gets sold at a profit, which sends rent up. Housing as investment is inherently parasitic, no matter how good the parasites are to their host

An aside, but the "parasite" thing is not really a leftist talking point. We stole it from Adam fucking Smith, and his point about it is that extracting value from something on the basis of just, like, owning something that exists with or without you is inherently shitty personally, and economically.

"As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce" - Adam Smith

Just look it up. He crashes out on rentiers all the time.

Also, corporate land lords are a much smaller part of the problem than most people suggest. Like, yes corporate land lords suck, but most land lords are not corporate landlords. It's more complex than that. Source. So, Yes. Small "Mom and Pop" landlords are bad, and there is a moral dimension to even the people you personally know who own more than one home, and there will continue to be as long as there are others who do not have a house.

I would still consider this horizontal violence. That equity could be used to make the world a better place instead of extracting value from fellow workers to pay for their kids college and inheritance ... and where the debts incurred buying 5 properties?

You're right that they are good people, because no one sees themselves as the villain in their own story. That insurance CEOs wife isn't lying when she says good things about him. Capitalism not only alienates you from your labour but also from your exploitation of others.

The sheer weight of human misery in your immediate surroundings is immeasurable and you never pay it any mind.

Lots of perfectly nice, pleasant, and moral people do jobs that make the world a worst place because of the circumstances they find themselves in. I would separate out how you treat and judge people, from the problematic systems that they might operate in.

But unless your aunt is only charging them what it costs her to operate the buildings + a reasonable hourly wage for the actual time she spends on the house every year, then yeah it's immoral.

If she puts in 10 hours a month and charges rent that is equal to her costs (not the property / mortgage costs, but just the ongoing operating and maintenance costs) + 120hrs of her time per year x ~$25/hr (or whatever wage is livable in your area) then it's fair, but realistically, assuming $6000 of property taxes, that would mean she would be charging ~$800 / month for that town home, and I'm guessing she's charging a lot more. In effect, that means that she is making renters pay for her mortgages while she's not working, and at the end of the day she will end up a multimillionaire off of her tenants' hard work.

On top of the fact that there are undoubtedly renters who would want to buy those townhomes but can't afford to only because landlords have bought up a limited supply and driven up prices.