Every rent check you write to a private individual is a transfer of your life to someone who owns a place to live.
This is not a moral judgment. It is a structural description. Housing is not a luxury good that some clever investor produces by genius. It is a fixed supply of shelter in a location where people need to be. When that shelter is owned by individuals whose primary relationship to it is extracting a monthly return, the owner does not add value. They intercept it. They sit between you and the walls that keep you warm, and they charge admission.
This post argues that individual landlords are parasites—not in the moralistic sense the word often carries, but in the precise structural sense. They extract value without producing it. They convert a basic need into a revenue stream. And they are the most over-represented, most politically protected, and most mythologized class of rentiers in the entire housing system. The fix is not better regulation of individual landlords. It is their replacement by institutions that own housing for reasons other than yield.
The “Mom-and-Pop” Fiction Is the Most Successful Propaganda Campaign in Housing Policy
The political defense of individual landlords rests on a single rhetorical move: the claim that they are “mom-and-pop” operators, small-scale savers, ordinary people supplementing a modest pension with one extra property. The image is warm, domestic, and entirely constructed. A 2025 study in Housing Studies examined how parliamentary and print media discourse in Ireland constituted the “Mom-and-Pop Landlord” subject-position. The authors found that the designator “normalises and valorises landlords, as everyday, hard-working, responsible subjects, who invest in proxy-pensions through their housing assets; while it simultaneously effaces and even erases rentier relations by constituting ‘caring’, ‘amateur’, ‘property owners’ as a separate/opposing category from corporate landlords”. The “Mom-and-Pop” figure is “repeatedly ascribed a strategically useful victimhood: a ‘squeezed middle’ preyed upon by unfair taxes, institutional rivals, opposition parties, troublesome tenants, and socialist and populist agitators”.
The empirical reality is less sentimental. Studies from the Netherlands, France, and elsewhere point to the “strong presence of individual landlords who reside in affluent parts of the countries where they hold property portfolios. Studies suggest these landlords come from relatively wealthy households; earn above-average incomes; are highly educated and possess more assets than other householders”. A separate 2025 paper critically examining the Spanish rental market found that “mom-and-pop” landlords are not the struggling pensioners of the political imagination but “typically multi-property landlords benefitting substantially from the rental market”. The Mom-and-Pop is not a person. It is a lobbying position.
The structural function of individual landlordism is not the provision of housing. It is the extraction of rent. The landlord who owns one or two properties does not manage them as a business with long-term investment horizons. They hold them as speculative assets, betting on appreciation, extracting whatever the market will bear in the meantime. The rental income is not the point. The capital gain is. This is why individual landlords are so hostile to rent control, so resistant to long-term tenancies, and so eager to convert long-term rentals into short-term ones the moment the platform economy makes it possible. Their interests are not aligned with the tenant’s need for stability. They are aligned with the asset’s need for liquidity.
Airbnb Is Cancer: The Platform That Ate the Long-Term Rental Market
The rise of short-term rental platforms did not emerge from nowhere. It was the direct consequence of a housing market already primed for financial extraction, and it metastasized through the most vulnerable neighborhoods first. The mechanism is simple. An apartment that was rented to a resident for €1,000 per month is converted to a short-term rental that generates €3,000 per month in tourist bookings. The resident is evicted. The apartment is now a hotel room. The neighborhood loses a neighbor and gains a rotating cast of strangers. The process repeats until the building, then the block, then the district is no longer a place where people live. It is a place where they stay.
The quantitative evidence is unambiguous. A 2026 study in Journal of Urban Regeneration and Renewal analyzed Airbnb’s expansion across three major Spanish cities and found that a 1% increase in Airbnb listings led to a 0.05% to 0.06% rise in rental rates. A separate analysis of European cities found that each additional Airbnb per square kilometer significantly raised rental prices by 0.02%, and a 1% increase in listings raised rents by 0.185–0.21%. A study of Corsica found that a 1% increase in Airbnb listings led to an average 0.21% rise in house prices. The effects are not evenly distributed. They concentrate in the neighborhoods where housing is already scarce, the residents already precarious, and the political power already weakest.
The European Commission’s own analysis is devastating. It found that “research shows that the impact of listings by multi-unit hosts on rents and house prices is stronger than listings owned by single-unit hosts” and that “multi-unit hosts have also been shown to drive out single-unit hosts despite operating in different segments of the market”. In Berlin, empirical evidence suggests that “the decrease in the number of long-term rentals and the increase in rental prices caused by Airbnb is driven in particular by commercial Airbnb listings”. The platform’s own defense—that it is a peer-to-peer network of ordinary people sharing their homes—is contradicted by the data. Inside Airbnb data demonstrates that “the percentage of listings that are managed by a single entity (host or property manager) with two or more units reached between 60 and 70% in Barcelona, the South Aegean Islands, Malta, Valencia”. The peer-to-peer fiction is a marketing device. The reality is a professionalized, commercial, extractive industry that uses the language of sharing to capture the housing stock of the world’s most desirable cities.
The consequences go beyond rent. The European Commission found that short-term rental growth “has also sparked concerns about noise, waste, local residents’ dissatisfaction with restaurants and crime” and describes “a reduction in population density in neighbourhoods with more STR, both as a direct consequence of owners short-term rental over long-term rental, and indirectly as higher prices prevent residents from moving into the neighbourhood”. The neighborhood is emptied of the people who give it life. It is filled with the people who consume it and leave. This is not a market failure. It is a market success—for the platform, for the host, for the tourists. The people who lose are the residents who can no longer afford to stay and the communities that can no longer function as communities.
The Decoupling: Why Short-Termism Is Structurally Incompatible with Housing
The housing crisis is not a supply crisis. It is a temporal crisis. The supply exists. The problem is that the supply is owned by actors whose time horizons are measured in quarters, not decades. An individual landlord thinks in years—maybe five, maybe ten—and their decisions reflect that horizon. When the market appreciates, they sell. When the regulations tighten, they exit. When the short-term rental yield is higher, they convert. The tenant is not a partner in a long-term relationship. The tenant is a source of cash flow during a holding period.
A 2026 European Parliament study on housing speculation drew the distinction precisely. It distinguishes four types of speculation. Types 1 and 2 involve “investment in existing housing stock and short-term strategies.” Type 3 speculation is defined as “business models that rely primarily on valuation gains rather than income generated through the productive use of housing assets: the higher the asset intensity, the more a landlord relies on valuation gains.” Type 4 speculation refers to “landlord practices that undermine tenants’ rights and housing security. Property management practices become speculative when their primary purpose is to generate higher returns through tenant replacement, rent escalation or asset revaluation”. The individual landlord is not an anomaly in this framework. They are its purest expression. They own housing not to provide it but to hold it—to wait for the value to rise, to extract whatever they can in the meantime, and to exit when the calculus changes.
The decoupling of housing from short-termism is not an argument for eliminating private ownership. It is an argument for restructuring the incentives of ownership. A landlord whose income depends on tenant retention, on building quality, on long-term relationships, behaves differently from a landlord whose income depends on appreciation. The former invests in maintenance. The latter defers it. The former wants stable, long-term tenants. The latter wants maximum turnover. The former is a steward. The latter is a rentier. Housing policy should reward the steward and eliminate the rentier.
The Only Structures That Actually Work
If individual landlords and short-term platforms are the problem, the solution is not to regulate them into benevolence. It is to replace them with ownership structures whose incentives are structurally aligned with the long-term provision of housing.
Public authorities are the first and most important alternative. Vienna is the proof. Approximately 60% of the city’s two million residents live in subsidized apartments, either in one of 220,000 municipal apartments or in units owned by limited-profit housing associations. The city’s rent-to-income ratios are “significantly lower than in other European cities”. The model works because the city owns the land, controls the development process, and holds the housing stock as a permanent civic asset. The rents are set to cover costs, not to generate returns. The tenants have secure tenancies. The buildings are maintained because the city has an interest in their longevity, not just their current yield. “In Vienna, housing is embedded into a durable political framework, supported by limited-profit housing associations. It is not a single project cycle. It is a civic system”.
Foundations and non-profit housing associations operate on a similar logic. The Dutch housing associations “operate with strong balance sheets and clear stewardship mandates, allowing them to absorb shocks rather than transfer them to residents”. They do not have shareholders demanding quarterly returns. They do not have owners waiting for the market to peak so they can sell. They have mandates—often legally defined—to provide affordable housing in perpetuity. The incentive structure is not profit. It is performance. The building is a long-term asset, not a short-term bet.
Co-operatives are the third model, and the evidence for their benefits is substantial. A submission to the Australian Senate Inquiry into cooperative housing found that “rental housing co-operatives offer an affordable, sustainable alternative to both public and private housing for people on low to moderate incomes, with a range of independently documented economic and social benefits to tenants.” These advantages include “stronger, healthier, more socially sustainable communities” and “strong feelings of belonging, ownership and empowerment, and consequently very low resident turnover”. A 2026 scoping literature review confirmed that “co-operative values underpin democratic decision-making, economic contributions, and sustainability practices, resulting in positive outcomes such as social solidarity and environmental stewardship”. The co-operative is not a charity. It is an ownership structure in which the residents are the owners, which means their interest in the building’s quality is the same as their interest in their own home. They are not extracting value from themselves.
Corporate and institutional landlords are the most contested of the alternatives, and the critique is not without merit. A 2026 study of Europe’s two largest landlords found that “institutional landlords, often framed as providers of affordable housing, in practice undermine this role. Through socially responsible rhetoric and partnerships with public actors, they obscure ongoing processes of commodification, rent increases, and displacement”. The same study notes that “these strategies exemplify how institutional landlords manipulate regulatory frameworks to extract rent, thereby exacerbating housing unaffordability and undermining tenant stability”. The institutional landlord is not a saint. But the institutional landlord has a different incentive structure from the individual landlord. The institution needs to hold the asset for decades to justify the acquisition cost. It needs to maintain the building to preserve the value. It needs to keep tenants to avoid vacancy losses. The Build-to-Rent sector has launched a voluntary code explicitly aimed at “differentiating Build To Rent from the wider Private Rented Sector” and committing to “fair and reasonable renting”, high-quality and safe homes, and professional management standards. The code is voluntary, and the industry is not a charity. But the institutional landlord is accountable in a way the individual landlord is not. They have a brand to protect, a regulatory relationship to maintain, and a portfolio whose value depends on the quality of the stock. The individual landlord has none of these constraints. They can extract until the building falls down and sell the land. The economy of scale means that Mom and Pop landlord earns an equal to or greater yield from a Build To Rent real estate scheme such as a REIT, a syndicate, or as a shareholder in a real estate developer than from their self-managed rental units. The same economy of scale means that the same Mom and Pop earns a higher yield from their short-term rental that is located within a coveted resort district or in a remote working or digital nomad hub than through a digital platform in a regular housing district. The platform charges its usually exorbitant fees, too.
Short-term rentals ought to be comprehensively banned and monitored in all non-resort districts and designated buildings. Getting caught with one should be treated as equal to theft, because it is theft.
The Zoning Solution: Put the Parasite Where the Host Actually Wants It
Here is the concession that makes the argument coherent rather than merely moralistic. The short-term rental economy serves a real demand. The tourist needs a bed for a week. The digital nomad needs a furnished apartment for a month. The expat needs a bridge between arrival and settlement. These are legitimate needs, and the market that serves them is not inherently parasitic. It becomes parasitic only when it colonizes the residential stock—when the apartment that should house a nurse, a teacher, a family, a retiree is converted into a rotating hotel room because the nightly yield is triple the monthly rent.
The foreigner visiting your neighbor is a welcome guest. The foreigner visiting an Airbnb in your neighbor is the reason why your rent is high.
The problem is not the existence of the short-term market. The problem is its location. And location is precisely what zoning regulates. The structural solution is to confine short-term rentals and speculative individual landlordism to designated resort and transient districts—zones where the economy is explicitly hospitality-based, where the paying customer is the tourist, the digital nomad, the expat on a rotation, where nightly pricing is normal, where turnover is expected, and where no one is pretending the building is a neighborhood. Inside those zones, the individual host competes honestly for the transient dollar, the platform pays its taxes, the hoteliers and the apartment operators are on the same regulatory footing, and the financial incentive is properly aligned: serve the paying customer well, because the customer will leave and review you. Outside those zones, in the mainstream residential districts, short-term letting is banned outright, ownership is restricted to public authorities, foundations, co-operatives, and regulated institutional landlords with long-term mandates, and the rental market is decoupled from yield entirely.
Short-term rentals inside city centers and traffic hubs ought to be permitted as hotels in their distinct, dedicated, purpose-built buildings.
This is not a compromise. It is a clarification. It stops forcing two incompatible economies—the hospitality economy and the housing economy—to compete for the same square meters, and it stops asking residents to subsidize the tourist’s convenience with their own displacement. The resort district is where the parasite belongs, because in a resort district, the parasite is not a parasite. It is a hotelier. The cancer is contained because the tissue it was consuming is no longer available to it. And the mainstream—the ordinary streets where people live, raise children, age, and die—is left to the ownership structures that actually treat housing as what it is: not an asset class, but a place to live.
Living in housing districts ought to only be available for those who also are tax residents.
The individual landlord is a parasite. They attach themselves to a social need—shelter—and extract value from it without producing it. They are not entrepreneurs. They are interceptors. Their income is not payment for a service. It is payment for permission to exist in a place where the owner has staked a claim. The Airbnb platform is a cancer. It grows by converting the tissue of the long-term housing market into short-term tourist accommodation, consuming the neighborhoods that host it and leaving behind a hollowed-out shell of rising prices, transient populations, and displaced communities.
You don’t build a factory inside a housing district. You build it inside an industrial district. The same logic applies to short-term rentals. Short-term rentals are a part of the tourism industry.
The alternative is not abstract. It is Vienna. It is the Dutch housing associations. It is the co-operative movement. It is the institutional landlord with a regulatory mandate to provide housing, not just extract rent. The ownership structures that work are the ones that hold housing as a long-term civic asset, not a short-term financial one. The structures that fail are the ones that treat housing as a liquid investment, a bet on appreciation, a vehicle for yield. The individual landlord is the purest expression of that failure. They are not “mom and pop.” They are the reason the rent is inflated.
Every Airbnb is a mini-Hillbrow.
References
Aalbers, M. B., Böhmer, F., & Fernandez, R. (2026). Housing speculation in the EU: Corporate landlords, real estate trusts, abusive speculative behaviour and impacts on prices and transactions. European Parliament, Policy Department for Transport, Employment and Social Affairs. PE 783.551.
Airbnb: The impact of P2P platforms on rental prices in large cities. (2026). Journal of Urban Regeneration and Renewal, 343–358.
Build to Rent Alliance. (2026). Build-to-rent sector launches code aimed at setting ‘gold standard’ for renters. Estates Gazette.
European Commission. (2026). Commission staff working document accompanying the report on short-term rentals. EUR-Lex 52026SC0606.
Gil, J., & Martínez, M. A. (2025). From ‘mom-and-pop’ to ‘vulnerable landlords’: Debunking the mythical figures that legitimise rent extraction and challenge rent control policies. Environment and Planning A, 57(6), 757–775.
Institutional practices can support quality affordable homes. (2026). Social Housing.
Morillas, F., Pastor, J. M., & Serrano, L. (2026). The impact of P2P platforms on rental prices in large cities: A comparative analysis. Journal of Urban Regeneration and Renewal, 343–358.
Rethinking value: Insights from a scoping literature review of the principles and benefits of housing co-operatives. (2026). Housing Studies.
Submission to the Senate Inquiry into the role, importance and overall performance of cooperative, mutual and member-owned firms. (2025). Parliament of Australia.
Vidal, L., Gil, J., & Martínez, M. A. (2025). Global corporate landlordism and a new cycle of tenant contention. Urban Studies, 62(16).
Vienna: Housing as a basic human right. (2025). Euskadi.eus.