this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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What service does the land speculator provide to the tenant? The landlord doesn't develop the property, that's the builder. The landlord doesn't maintain the property, that's done by contractors. The landlord doesn't secure the property, that's done by the state. The landlord often doesn't even finance the property, as the property is inevitably mortgaged and underwritten by banks one step removed from the title holder.
Quite literally, the only thing landlords do is collect the check and transfer portions of it onward. They are, at best, payment processors. And even this job is routinely outsourced to a third party.
There are lower institutional barriers to renting than to owning, largely resulting from the artificial shortage of public land and public housing. Rents are the consequence of real estate monopolization and public malinvestment. Once the landlords themselves vanish, the "benefits" of renting vanish with them.
There's an old joke Donald Trump likes to tell, back in the 90s when he was underwater on his personal holdings. He's driving through Lower Manhattan in a limo with his daughter and he points out the window to a homeless man. Then he quips, "I'm $800M poorer than that man". To which his daughter replies, "If that's true why are we in a limo while he's out on the street?"
The key thing that the landlord handles is risk. If the roof is very expensive to fix, that is not the contractor's problem. If the property does not generate revenue, that is not the bank's problem. If the property is not worth the cost to build, that is not the builder's problem. If the property is unsafe to live in, that is not the renter's problem.
The landlord's financial risk in the property (should) provide an incentive to maintain and make use of that property.
I'm not saying there aren't other system of distribution people to homes, and I'm not saying that the capitalist system in the US is the best system to do it. I'm just pointing out that a core principle of capitalism is risk, and that is what the landlord provides, a single point buffer of risk for the other parties involved.
This is completely ignorant of the fact that landlords can get insurance for those things and often dont have to pay anything at all. And when they do have to pay themselves, they will pay the minimum amount possible to maximize their profits often resulting in degrading housing that people living in suffer the consequences for.
Housing is a human right. Capitalism commits violence against the people by denying them shelter. It's a crime against humanity. Landlords exist only to profit off of this system. By your own exact definition all homeowners are the same point of risk mitigation, and therefore all renters would also be the same point of risk mitigation. Landlords have inserted themselves as a middle man to steal the labor of the working class. They profit off of the venture. Thats the whole point of them doing it.
They still have to pay insurance to get insurance. And I'm not sure you can get insurance against the roof getting old (not in my area anyway). When the roof is too old and needs replacing, you do it out of pocket/bank loan. Complete roof replacement are not so often (depending on material), so you can (and should) as a home owner save up to this.
You've got this upside-down. The existence of the insurance industry in a capitalist system is proof that risk is a thing that can be bought, sold, traded, banked and spent. If there was no financial cost to risk, then there would be no market for insurance to mitigate that risk.
The landlord gives up some income in order to mitigate risk, and most of the time, only some of that risk. I have yet to see or hear of an insurance policy that would basically cut a check for 100% of an insured item's value unconditionally. If it did exist, it would probably be more expensive than the object itself.
Go and have a look at property prices over the last 50 years and see how risky it is.
Should hotels be illegal too? That’s basically renting out a room by the day. What if you cannot afford to buy a house, or only want to live somewhere temporarily? If you cannot rent any place to live, what would you do?
As with most things, it is a matter of degree.
If they're monopolizing the housing market, absolutely.
There are 16M vacant homes to distribute among around 770k homeless people. With such an enormous housing surplus, why is the clearing price for a housing unit so far above a new prospective buyer's budget?
You posit that people can't afford to buy homes without asking why homes are unaffordable.
Investors accounted for 25.7% of residential home sales in 2024.
In that article, the word "investors" is deliberately lumping together individuals, and institutions/corporations, in an obvious attempt to trick people into thinking that category is comprised entirely of the latter. Underhanded semantic maneuver. Within the same article:
Corporations are people, my friend.
Is ownership less virtuous in a partnership than a sole proprietorship somehow?
I merely pointed out that not all ‘rent is bad’, ‘landlords are evil’.
Among probably many reasons that housing is unaffordable for many is that some persons or corporations are awful scumbags that want to maximize their profit beyond what is reasonable or fair.
Renting isn’t bad. Capitalism isn’t bad. Abuse of these things is bad.
Abuse of these things is a core feature of capitalism. How can you contradict yourself so quickly?
The world is not black and white. I don’t accept the validity of your claim.
Shelter is a fundamental human need, locking it behind an unnecessarily high and ever increasing pay wall is the epitome of abuse. Landlords are leeches.
Yes it is. But you and I both said it. It is abuse of capitalism.
I would support some idea that corporations cannot own property like single homes solely for the purpose of profit. And any single person should be heavily taxed on rental income, at least beyond a certain point.
And let’s use eminent domain to take back those empty houses and put people in them.
But there’s still lots of people who would prefer to rent than own.
The problem is not landlords. And the problem is not capitalism. The problem is unfettered greed. Greed is not good, despite what Michael Douglas said in that movie.
The world is not black and white. But still you will 100% keep your claim. Again. Contradict yourself in two sentences.
All rent is bad and all forms of landlords are evil. They are a separate class with legal mandate to steal the labor value of the working class. They serve no function whatsoever and it is entirely conceivable that an apartment building's occupants could pool money together for repairs when that is necessary.
Shelter is a human right. Housing is a human right. Landlords are not mechanics, they are not repair men, they are not construction workers, they are not laborers. Some Landlords may do some of those things, but it doesn't change the fact that by virtue of stealing from the working class they are still evil. If they want to do repair work, I should be able to simply pay them for the repair work they do. If they want to do property maintenance work, I should be able to simply pay them for the property maintenance. They have a legal document enabling them to steal half of my income every month for no reason. They do not live in my home, I live in my home. If I stopped living there it wouldn't be my home anymore.
There are 0 downsides to entirely rejecting the housing market. Housing is a human right, it should be fairly distributed to everyone. I couldn't give a fuck about real estate markets, they could all dissappear today and no one would ever profit off of housing again and not a single tear would be shed. I'd really like it if everyone could have a fucking home. All Landlords are evil. There are NO exceptions. If they collect rent for someone else's home, they are evil.
I think there's a middle ground between 'consuming all housing stock in hopes of making airbnbs' and 'illegal'. There's a legitimate case for short term and medium term residence that doesn't make sense with ownership. However while we should accommodate those, it is a fair point the market should be regulated so that people have a reasonable path to ownership if it makes sense without being stuck with competing with rent-seeking corporations sucking up all the inventory.
There are a few fundamental things a landlord provides:
This comes together for renting making a whole lot of sense for people on a remote work assignment, college students, and seasonal occupants who need a residence for a few months or a couple of years. Also for people who have just moved out on their own and need a residence while they get some credit history under their belt, hopefully being in a situation like university where the need is short term as well.
You're intentionally leaving out that the landlord maintains the property and appliances. That's no small thing.
There are absolutely bad landlords who will do as little as their tenants will allow them to, for sure. Landlords aren't like cops though, the continuing existence of bad landlords is not enabled by good ones like how "good cops" do.
The landlord uses my rent money to pay others to maintain the property. It's an entirely middle man position of zero value to society
Well, not always. Back in college (btw, a prime example of valid rental scenario), when the water heater in my rental started dripping, the landlord himself was there with a new water heater in his pickup same day.
Some landlords (by far not all, maybe only a minority) take on the risk directly and do the work themselves.
They're still buying a surplus of housing, creating scarcity that raises home prices, and charging you more than it costs to live in the housing they're hoarding.
So even if they're doing the maintenance themselves (and no guarantee they're doing a good job), they're still a drain on the resources of actual workers.
Housing must be decommodified.
Their scenario was that they bought the house and rented it out while their kid went to college, with the expectation that they would have the house for the kid after college (their college was like 30 minutes away, and the kid lived in the dorm, so it was a perfectly reasonable expectation they might want to move into a house in the area).
Ultimately, the kid didn't move back and they sold the property, but they bought it during what they saw as a dip in the market and used rent to keep it active while waiting for the kid to return.
You might say that a different system could have provided for all of this, but within the framework of the system they had, they were decent folks doing the right thing as landlord and not sucking up housing stock that they didn't plan on actually having be owned by the resident. I'm reasonably confident that they even charged less than a mortgage+insurance+taxes would have been for me and between interest and closing costs, no way I would have come out ahead buying and then selling the property in the short time I lived there. Even with that reasonable rent they waived it when I got laid off from my college job.
Again, not every rental experience and in fact probably a small minority, but a landlord is not automatically evil.
Eating meat is not automatically evil but if you look at it objectively and at the current scale it is indisputably a moral wrong. Same goes to hoarding homes.
Good landlords will only be as good as they need to be, to continue renting. In a housing shortage, that means they will keep getting worse over time, doing little and hearing little from their tenants who have only ever dealt with predatory landlords.
They will almost always charge as much as they can, not doing anything to help the renters.
The exceptions to this will be invisible on the market, because renters will do everything in their power to never move out or change their situation.
Long time renters are trapped, because they are paying nearly as much as a mortgage, and getting no equity from it, unable to save a down payment to get out of it.
Renting to seasonal, temp workers or students is about the only exception where renting is a necessary service, but currently its way over priced, so its not a great value. So still predatory.
I mean, this is an overly dismissive statement, those aren't 'good landlords', but it's also fair to note that the likelihood of getting a 'good' landlord is like a lottery.
In college I experienced both a person renting out a property they owned and a more 'corporate' arrangement. The corporate arrangement was 'meh', didn't do much one way or the other. The personal rental was nicer and cheaper, and they were out the same day when we reported the one thing that ever needed fixing. When they heard I got laid off, they waived rent until I got a new job.
You can own a property and pay landscapers and handyman for less than the cost of renting. Hell, I've had landlords pay property managers to handle even that.
a place to live
Tendentious language.
You think providing exclusive access to a house for the renter to live in is not something that has value?
Soon I will probably become a landlord, not because I want to but because it makes financial sense. My partner and I are pooling money to buy a place together so we can live together, she will sell her apartment and I will rent out my old apartment, which I bought with my own money and worked 20 years for to pay off. Are you suggesting I should just have to give the fruit of my 20 years of labor away to someone for free?
You're fucking insane.