this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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Rent isn't theft. It's payment for a service. Whether or not that service is of value to you is a different story, but not everyone is interested in owning.
There are benefits to renting. You don't have to be financially responsible for repairs, you don't have to do maintenance, you have much less financial risk, and you can relocate much easier.
And not all landlords are rich people. I do agree that corporate ownership of residential property shouldn't be allowed, though.
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?"
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.
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?