this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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I'm surprised so many people are running defence for landlords in the comments
People aren't defending landlords per se. People are defending the opportunities afforded by having extra space and letting someone else pay what it costs to live there.
Renting as a concept goes back to antiquity, and this is an absolutist stupid take that makes it sound like OP doesn't understand how real life works.
Not everywhere is a large city. Not all renters live in the same place for 20 years. Not all landlords are evil shitbags or faceless corporations. Sure, plenty are. Some are just families that are lucky to not have to sell their house if they move for work that lasts only a couple years.
I end up moving every couple of years, and so I've had to sublet the last part of a lease I've had, and gladly rented places from friends, random people on Craigslist, whatever, for weeks or months at a time. So I'm a thief because I sublet an apartment for 3 months? So dumb.
Long-term renting is really more the issue as landlords do just sit and leech and renters get nothing to show for it. But the fact remains that renting a room or an apartment is something that has since literally ancient times made more sense than huge amounts of unused housing you aren't allowed to use. So this is actually a nuanced argument against a particular class of people and corporations. Meaning that the premise is flawed enough for most people to roll their eyes and ignore it.
The whole "rent is theft!" trope doesn't even make sense from a political messaging viewpoint. What's your suggested alternative? That's not apparent at all. So this ends up sounding like saying "I want hot spaghetti for dinner!" and just expecting it to happen.
Also, a rather large number of people have rented something out, rented a room out, etc. thanks to AirBnB that this messaging makes enemies out of a whole lot of normal people by using absolute terms. People like me ask "Did my friends that helped me out steal from me? Of course not."
If you think that anyone who thinks a reasonable exchange of a service for an agreed up on fee are committing theft, then you've alienated 98% of people with the premise alone by calling them criminals.
Six paragraphs of you not understanding the issue: the problem is not the concept of renting a living space for a given time, the problem is private rent, i.e. rent for the landowner's profit.
Every single problem with current rent could be solved by socializing housing and making it available to rent at production+maintenance prices, and people could still move freely without being tied to a house in particular, without the risk of being evicted, would be able to paint the walls and have pets...
Just because things could theoretically be handled differently doesn't make landlords "thieves" as the title claims.
I'm currently a home owner and not a landlord, but if I would become a landlord, it wouldn't be in my power to implement any of your solutions, leaving in the middle whether they have merit or not.
All I can do is try to live in the system that exists, and in that context there's nothing unethical about charging rent to provide someone exclusive access to a property that I worked 20 years for to pay off plus 10 years to save for the down payment. Like, I'm just a wage slave myself and there's literally over 250k of my own money in my house ... why should I have to give that away for free? Seems to me that trying to take the fruits of my labor (i.e. the house that I worked for) for free is the thievery here.
It would be in your power to set the rent. If you set the rent at the cost of maintenance + any other recurring costs, then yes, it's totally fair. If you set the rent such that you make a profit, you'd be earning money for doing nothing.
The property that you worked 20 years to pay off and 10 to pay the down payment for is yours, you get to keep it. You don't have to give it away for free, you'll either sell it for a fair price and keep that money, or your heirs will have it. All that the opponents of rentseeking and landlordism are asking for is that you not use the property to make profit between now and when you sell it or pass it on to your heirs.