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 or pay someone to do it for you, 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.
Spot the landlord
Owning a house isn't a service.
This is one of the most capitalist takes you'll ever see on lemmy. I wonder if this person is a landlord or has landlords in the family...
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.
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:
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
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.
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.
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.
Been renting the last 20 years, and I can rightfully say FUCK YOU!!!
Can you agree it's at least exploitative?
It can be exploitative, but it's not automatically so. Both parties benefit from the agreement in different ways.
I don't get how this above conversation isn't just /thread.
7 people who downvoted, care to explain? Genuinely curious what your take is.
Of course it's exploitative, that isn't a question. The entire purpose of rent is to exploit. The down voters are people who recognize that it's complete nonsense to suggest housing rental could ever not be exploitative.
I dunno man. When we moved into our apartment we got a new water heater, new washer/dryer, new kitchen sink, and HVAC repaired within the first couple weeks. We've gotten multiple smaller things fixed as well including exterior tuck pointing to fix a leak.
Sometimes I lament not owning, but that would have all been out of pocket if we had bought a property as is with those issues. Didn't cost us a dime.
There are undeniable benefits to renting. I rent. It's still a for-profit business in the end, though, and per capitalism, they'll fuck you as hard as you let them.
But I also fuck them as hard as they let me. And in my city and state, which have very strong tenants' rights protections, my fucking goes a long way.
It's important to be aware of the fact that as long as we allow landlords to exist, they will work tirelessly to get rid of all of these regulations. They have the money and power to do so, and their condition depends on it.
Good on you.
It's hard for most people who see rent rise faster than salary. Which is the case for most of the United States.
In the interest of pedantry, technically you are correct.
Land ownership is theft, rent is just the symptom.
By that logic owning anything is theft.
You're almost there!
Mostly, yeah. In the western world, anyways, pretty much everything we have was gained via theft. So it isn't earned and we shouldn't treat property like it's gained via merit.
Part of the payment is for services, but it doesn't make sense overall to call it a service because the cost is only in small part determined by the value of upkeep etc. being handled, there is no option to do this yourself instead and not pay. The main thing driving the cost of housing is the supply of housing, the desirability of the location, and who owns it all.
Think about mobile homes; how well built a mobile home is, or how well it is maintained, ultimately doesn't matter that much and it will still depreciate if it is located on rented land, because the real driver of housing value is the value of the legal right to live in that particular location, and that right is ultimately controlled by the owner of the lot. Same goes for any housing; what matters most is the land, being able to safely and legally sleep there, and the ability of the property owner to control who can do that.
Sure there's a service and the owner has costs, but it's actually quite unrelated to the rental price in most places. I think the question is about the regulation of markets for basic life requirements. Alternatives aren't very appealing IMHO: social aids (taxes on the rich), charity (by the rich), or persistent homelessness.