this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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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.
Keep dodging.
This "landlords are purely evil and rent is stealing" discourse doesn't do any of us any good. It's dishonest and makes people with sense not want to join your cause. If we actually want to make housing better and more available, we can't be wasting our time throwing with this.
Landlords are purely evil, they are nothing but a drain on society, and if you disagree you're my enemy and we have no common cause.
Which of my statements are false?
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.