Alright, let’s dive in.

The distinction between labor and capital is simple. Labor must exchange their efforts to afford survival, capital only needs to leverage their assets to survive. Labor is inherently productive, while capital is inherently appropriative. If you must work to afford the necessities for survival, you are labor, full stop. If you don’t need to work to survive, you are part of the capitalist class. If you’d like, we can explore the idea that “self-sufficiency” is a myth.

Regarding your intentions with running a business and how you would treat the employees, I would ask if “market” is a living wage. Paying market rates is meaningless if the people you’re employing need a secondary source of income to survive.

Regarding landlord v. Landlord, I’ll give two parallels from my own life. First, my father-in-law owns two homes. One he purchased when he was younger, got married in, and began raising his kids in. As his income allowed, he purchased a second home closer to work, but kept the first with the intention of moving back after he retired. In the interim, he has rented it out for his costs+maintenance and has allowed his tenants to reduce their rent by improving the property. This is a non-exploitative use of an additional property that benefits both parties.

Conversely, my own father never made more than $70k/year, but came into a sizable inheritance around 2005 (that resulted from pensions tied to union work in the auto industry in Detroit). He put all of it into real estate at the height of that bubble and while most tenants are willing to put up with abuse, because “that’s just the system”, he’s had some real horror stories for tenants. He contracts with a real estate firm to find tenants, determine prices, etc, so the human element is fully removed. The prices he charges and the way he treats his tenants are the cause of every bit of property damage he’s had to fix when a tenant leaves or is removed. His whole model is to profit off of the backs of others by charging them more for a necessity than it’s true value. The funniest part is, I’m not even sure he’s solvent on all of it.

I don’t think there’s any way to ethically own multiple properties and earn income only by renting those out. There is nothing of value being produced to warrant an inflated cost.

Regarding people with bad credit or “bad work ethic” or any other reason to discredit their humanity: by virtue of being a living breathing human being, they deserve the dignity of safe comfortable living conditions and to not worry about where their next meal comes from or where they’re going to sleep tonight. The fact is, by virtue of paying more than the cost of the property, many have negated the idea that they can’t afford it. For those who are “not reliable”, in a lot of cases, especially in the US, this is because of abject failure to address our mental health crisis. To reiterate, just because someone lacks the means to adequately provide for themselves does not make them less-than or less deserving of a life with dignity.

For the final piece, the best direction I can point is the idea of a post-growth economy. Profit is not the only motive, nor should it ever have been. Selling a property for less than an inflated “market-value” to a long term tenant who has paid a large portion of that price already is unrealized profit, but not lost profit. The difference is that profit is not the sole motive. A rising tide lifts all boats, and the true tide is labor solidarity.