In Road to Wiggan Pier, George Orwell wrote that the worst housing available to people weren't the major corporations or business that owned numerous properties

In Road to Wiggan Pier, George Orwell wrote that the worst housing available to people weren't the major corporations or business that owned numerous properties, but the petty landlords. The ones who barely could afford upkeep. We also noticed that after the Land Consolidation Act in Britain that food outputs shot up enormously so as not to waste peoples time being minor farmers who toiled a lot for little in comparison to major institutions that could create much larger outputs at a fraction of the effort. What I'm getting at is, small towns and the like tend to be dominated by petty landlords and what have you. Or someone wealthier elsewhere that can fund endeavors there because they can't where they live. The unfortunate aspect is like the events George Orwell stated. Lots of rundown or lesser paying places. The notion that consolidation of markets is somehow bad because it drives down people's autonomy has been around for ages and all we've seen time and time again that it actually benefits people more often than it doesn't. You don't have to worry about crop yields, you worry about a boring office job. You don't have to worry about house maintenance, just who to call to fix these complex things. It allows for people to specialize in fields instead of making a population of "Jack of All Trades." The latter make for a better system when you're predominantly agrarian. The former is better when you've got a system so complex that you need people to hyper specialize in something specific so they don't have to worry about other minutia work.