Nobody has incentives or cashflow that will change this. At best if we built more housing it's something landlords might face competitive pressure over. In which case it might change. But currently cases where someone has a choice between two equivalent rentals and can try to pick the efficient one are pretty few and far between. Most people just try to balance as low of a monthly rent payment as possible with their commute and not having to rent from a slumlord type.
You're describing a problem which regulation is designed to fix. People argue about how effective that is, and post counter intuitive outcomes, but I think the central point remains: there's little evidence a deregulated housing market fixes it either.
Corporate landlords probably have more motivation to repect enforced obligations. So the ultimate corporate landlord is some level of government, and then we've arrived where I think we should be: public housing is a right.
Home efficiency matters to people who own a home, not renters. Renters only care about making rent and being able to eat. They don’t have the luxury of thinking about energy saving appliances when the landlord hasn’t fixed the appliances they do have. Renters are trapped with capped wages and increasing rents.
It's quite common for utilities like water and gas to be shared, where the renter is billed proportionally to the usage of the entire block/rental complex.
Plus, people generally aren't doing chores or using appliances unnecessarily. That means it's difficult to find ways to save meaningful amounts of energy other than adjusting the thermostat. Most household energy use outside heating /cooling comes from the appliances they can't upgrade, so the alternatives are quality of life issues like fewer showers and less laundry.
If you had two identical looking houses for identical rent, one could cost $100/mo to heat/cool and the other could cost $300. This isn't really something that renters are realistically able to discriminate on.
How many renters would even want to replace appliances, get new insulation installed, get all their lights replaced, etc.?
I had a bunch of work done after a kitchen fire in my house and it did genuinely cut my electrical bill. It also cost a lot of money and is something I wouldn't have done by choice especially in a rental property.
You would certainly need to be a serious long-term renter.
I purchased a home with a walk-out basement (brick exterior, cinder block foundation, >80% above grade). As it turned out, the prior owners had pulled a fast one and faked their framing with 1x4s and added no insulation. Our monthly power bills ranged from 400-500$ on a 2,000 sqft home.
I spent most of last year gutting the interior of the basement, framing, plumbing, electrical, insulation (R-13 fiberglass batt insulation), Sheetrock, paint, trim, flooring (laminate @ 2$ per sqft). I spent approximately $10k on this project doing the labor myself.
As a result, my bills are now in the 200-250 range. I had the insulation work done by 01/2025 for context. So, perhaps a new efficient water heater? But any serious work is unlikely to be worth the costs.
Replacing kitchen appliances is a quick job for common pieces like refrigerators. Most other kitchen appliances can be done in a day even if they're built-in as long as you get something that occupies the same space.
Insulation upgrades are heavy remodel jobs: Opening the walls requires people to leave the space for the duration of the job. Even if you can stack contractors back to back perfectly it's still a lot of time and displacement.
These things usually happen between renters when the space is vacant. In larger units you can some times shuffle renters between similar spaces but it's a huge pain and they usually don't want to do it.
Some things are less standardized than others. That said my kitchen was totally redone after a fire. Dishwasher was basically a 1 for 1 replacement pre-fire but everything else had to be redone.
Most kitchen appliances are very standardized. Refrigerators come in certain widths (30", 32", 34"). Over the range microwaves are a standard size. Dishwashers fit into a 24" wide space unless you specifically get a compact or oversized dishwasher (rare). Ovens come in certain widths.
It's rare to have a kitchen appliance that requires a specialized space that you have to build the kitchen around. Unless you're dealing with odd very high end appliances, a skilled installer can almost always find something from the local home store that fits into the old space.
(Source: Time spent in construction and renovation)
> I got cabinet above fridge taken out because fridges have basically gotten taller.
You're right that refrigerator heights aren't standardized but you must have had a really short space if nothing at all would fit.
Installations are typically supposed to leave some additional clearance for the heat to escape from behind, although some builders will try to tightly integrate them for a different look. (High end and commercial refrigerators are designed to actively exhaust and don't have the same limitations)
I’ve lived in my rental for ~15 years now (rent control) - to be honest, if I’d known when I moved in how long I’d be here, I’d have paid for some upgrades. It’s not equity, but I do still live here.
Even without rent control, being known by the landlord as a reliable tenant in a troubled apartment/building... is a way to eventually have one of the least expensive apartments in an area, through a series of only small rent increases.[1]
Every little repair and upgrade I've made has been more than worthwhile, and I only wish I had made more.
Though, a friend in a nicer place went and made a deal with his landlord, for landlord to pay for only materials for substantial DIY renovation friend would do. Suddenly, his apartment had higher market value...
[1] Unless landlord participates in RealPage/YieldStar, and is pushed to illegal price-fixing.
I've done upgrades in rented apartments at my own cost because finding a rental with said upgrades already done was either outright impossible or would've cost even more in rent than the cost of the upgrades spread out over the leasing period.
Many. My entire apartment is filled with large single pane windows. There's zero draft sealing at any of them, nor the front door. I likely pay an additional $100 in electricity a month due to this.
It was noticeably reduced when I took the time to 3M wrap all my windows one winter, but I didn't want to do it again.
So why do anything to improve rental units? Make them slightly better than a corrugated steel shack? No thanks, that just means the landlord can market it as a "luxury condo" and charge me up the ass for it. I'll live in my steel shack thank you very much.
In the UK if you sell or rent out a house it has to have an energy certificate with a rating (specified by a letter). I'm pretty sure that you aren't allowed to rent out properties with less than a certain rating and that rating which is higher than you might expect.
This is true. The rating is actually pretty low though - they only need to be a band E on the EPC. It’s soon to be C though.
One of the… problems with that is that a lot of our housing stock is very old, and honestly not ever going to reach that. The grading don’t take partial improvements into account so if you do internal wall insulation on half your house it means absolutely nothing on the EPC. The means to get to C for older properties basically require insulation (not practical in pre cavity wall buildings without an ungodly amount of work) and renewable installs. That’s not to say we shouldn’t try but it’s a tall order to ask anyone to rip everything back to brick and build cavity walls in th pre 1930 stock (which there’s absolutely craploads of)
But surely a higher rating would generally commend higher rents meaning either way it's the landlord pocketing the savings and the tenant is no better?
It’s changing to C in a few years. But the ratings are odd - only fully completed items count so if you insulate the rooms as you go, you won’t get the EPC benefit until everything has been completed. There’s no partial credit
Most times your land lord won't let you make anything nicer. They basically want the place to degrade around you so that they can low key force you to leave causing you to abandon your rent control.
Most rentals across the US and even the world don't have rent control.
You've highlighted one of the downsides of rent control: It changes the incentive structure dramatically in ways that aren't always a win for the tenant. I had a friend in a rent controlled apartment who would quietly do things like upgrade his appliances and fix things because his rent was so low he didn't want to rock the boat for any reason at all.
Considering that tax credits cover only 1/3rd of the materials (not the installation) and have hard caps of 1,500 it should come as no surprise that landlords don’t care and won’t cover improvements. They’re not paying the power or suffering the cold at the end of the day.
This is pretty much it. Most renters are paying for utilities and don't realize why they're so high.
My kid has been renting the same apartment while in school and their fridge failed over the summer. She manages the utilities and mentioned that their power bill halved as a result of the replacement. She said what they were paying before didn't seem outrageous so it came as a surprise to see the newer bills were consistently half of what it had been before.
And the tenants have to be moved out of the unit and housed somewhere else during some of these renovations, which is going to cost the landlord far more than $1500.
Could be solved with more free markets. What a funny phenomenon this is: "reluctance to make even basic upgrades" -- landlords don't care because they have too much market power and aren't even attempting to compete with each other.
Imagine if car makers didn't bother with fuel efficiency because buyers had almost no choice and any car is better than nothing. We'd say that market isn't functioning well. Perhaps the problem is caused by price caps so it's not worth carmakers competing, or perhaps the law limits the number of cars that can be produced so there's always a shortage. Or perhaps it's the soviet union and there's no incentive for them to improve anything because the planners haven't demanded that they do.
Why would a landlord care about expensive efficiency upgrade? They don't pay the utility bills. Efficiency upgrades would only justify a higher rent to cover the work. The upgrades would essentially be a "luxury" upgrade that would raise the rent in this free market scenario. Would the higher rent be offset by the utility savings? Probably not.
Assuming the work was free (it never would be but just go with it), the upgrade would save about $100/month in electricity. To a prospective tenant, that means they'd be willing to pay up to $100 more in rent to break even. Now since we live in the real world, that upgrade now has to be paid for. The work cost $4.8k and the landlord wants to pay for it over 2 years so now there's a $200/month increase. But the work will only save $100/month. The tenant is now paying an extra $100 in total living expenses. By the time the 2 years are up, the landlord isn't going to cut the rent by $200, he'll just continue to charge the same or more than what it was 2 years ago. The tenant will forever be paying that extra $100 in living expenses while the landlord gets to pocket an extra $200.
What's needed is a baseline of acceptable housing for tenants and rent controls that force the landlord to share at least some of the financial burden.
Saving on gas money is nice, but EVs are just generally nicer vehicles. Smoother, better acceleration. No screwing around with oil changes or filling up with gas. Etc.
My ev on the track accelerates better - but the turbo charged ice with a stick shift I test drove the same day was a lot more fun. You feel the acceleration more when the shift/power curves force it.
honestly both have far more acceleration than I use or want in the real world. But the fun factor is still there at lower acceleration in the ice.
Not talking about consumers. Car makers, as that's what my parent posited. "The market made car makers do fuel efficiency all by itself!". Yeah, no.
Which traditional car maker actually cared about EVs before Tesla came along?
(Even Toyota, which was sorta "caring about it" did not believe in going "all in" and for a very very long time would only do Hybrid and nothing more).
Every other established car maker did not invest in this until "forced" by Tesla so to speak. And then spurred on by things like the EU regulations to no longer allow any non-EV new car registrations by ... was it 2035? Which I hear they're now thinking about undoing.
>"The market made car makers do fuel efficiency all by itself!". Yeah, no.
A "market" includes consumers, almost by definition, so the statement is true. Otherwise it just becomes a meaningless statement where companies can't be said to do anything.
For a slightly less contentious example, consider gaming chairs. I think most people would assume it's something "the market" came up with, considering that there wasn't some government regulation mandating gaming chairs. Consumers demanded gaming chairs, and chair companies filled the gap. A market success story, right? Nope, according to the above definition, chair companies can't do anything. They only made gaming chairs because consumers demanded them. It's actually consumers that made (?) gaming chairs!
High efficiency apartments are actually kind of normal in newer more expensive rentals. Its the lower end rental properties that landlords think it doesn't make sense investing in; the rent increases that would come a long with the upgrades just wouldn't make sense for the market they are going for.
Available rentals are still priced according to their relative value.
If most landlords have newly updated units on the market for $2000/month and someone tries to rent a similar unit untouched since 1970 for $2000/month, that unrenovated unit is going to sit on the market for a very, very long time.
You're exactly right and the economics of it are pretty well studied. I know quite a few people in real estate, they're always eager to upgrade their property (read: make it more valuable) because then they can make more money. If their price is capped, though, they just don't make the investment. Rightly so, but at the end of the day, the renter is the one getting ripped off by the politician he voted for because the rent was too damn high.
Just let people create value and trade.
PS: Sad that you're getting downvotes for a thoughtful, polite comment, too. Downvotes are for hiding idiocy and meanness, not viewpoints that you disagree with.
Landlords also contribute to educational and class mobility. Students can study at distant but better schools because they don't need to buy a home before they can move and they can return home or anywhere else much easier because they don't have to then find a buyer for the property to cash out. Job seekers can take a job across the country and not need enough spare cash to make multiple flights back and forth across the country to house hunt first. Landlords allow people to take vacations and trips to places they would otherwise never see because they don't live there. Landlords allow small businesses to launch without first needing to buy commercial real estate.
I spent 15 years living in my current state before I bought a home. In that time I moved on average every 2 years often due to changing jobs or changing living circumstances. There is no way I could have afforded to buy a home when I first moved here, and even if I could have, I didn't know anywhere near enough about the area or where I would be in 5 years let alone 10 or 20 to have made a good choice for where to buy that home. I love my home but owning this home has cost me well over 50k in repairs and maintenance in the 15 years I've owned it. That is absolutely money I would not and did not have when I first moved to this state and it would have financially ruined me to have bought and owned a home when I first moved here.
Have I had some crappy landlords? Sure. I've also had some great ones too and have very fond memories of some of the places I've lived over the years. None of which would have been possible without landlords in general.
>They buy a property, rent it out, then use it as collateral for another rental.
I'd like to know which lenders allow you to do this, given a standard mortgage starts at 20% down and needs to be paid down from there. Unless you're committing mortgage fraud you can't exceed whatever initial leverage you started out with.
Where's all the equity coming from? Keep in mind when you're buying the house in the first place, you're competing with other people who are also potential renters. They're incentivized to bid up to whatever their rents are, which also happens to equal how much you can hope to earn by renting it out. If anything they're willing to bid even higher, given how people are irrationally attracted to housing, and how much you can hope to earn is even lower because you have costs they don't. Banks won't give you preferential rates either, because some lending to some DINK household is going to be much less risky than lending to some landlord that's levered to the hilt. Your equity accumulation will be glacial, barring change in the macroeconomic, which is by no way assured. Or mortgage fraud.
A landlord is a parasite by definition, since they don't produce anything, and charge money for producing nothing. But they perform important functions in our society, like providing housing. Even though landlords don't actually produce housing, without landlords there would be no housing and that would suck.
>A landlord is a parasite by definition, since they don't produce anything, and charge money for producing nothing.
No, they provide capital. In modern society it's hard to picture what "capital" actually is aside from some wall st bankers in suits, but at the most basic level it's forgone consumption. Every dollar invested in a company or a house is a dollar that could have been spent on an iPhone or a nice steak, and whoever forgone that consumption needs to be compensated for it, otherwise nobody would bother doing so.
This is a clever perspective, but you have to again ask where that foregone consumption is coming from. It is coming from mainly workers and renters and the sums are concentrated into a single parasitic entity.
>It is coming from mainly workers and renters and the sums are concentrated into a single parasitic entity.
If you're trying to imply that absent landlords, every renter in Manhattan is going have $3000 (or whatever) more in their bank accounts per month and can buy so many iPhones and steaks, it quickly breaks down when you think of second order effects:
1. There are only so many apartment units in Manhattan. How do you dole them out? First come first served? How's that any different than the current situation where boomers are set for life, and young people are locked out of the housing market unless they're rich or they inherit? Everyone giving up $3000/month for a place to live in might not be ideal, but it's better than the alternative. In areas without a rental market, but where supply exceeds demand, a black market eventually develops where it basically turns into rent.
2. If there's no cost for continuing to live in an apartment, what incentive is there to vacate a unit? Manhattan is expensive to live in because that's where the jobs are, but if lived there and then retired, why bother moving? It's not costing your anything, why bother uprooting your life, or even downsizing? Note that even owners have incentive to vacate their unit, because it means they can either rent it out for $$$, or sell it to someone else. Absent that you'll have to pry them from their cold dead hands.
3. How would new housing get built? Skyscrapers are expensive, so you need some of capital to build. It might be hard to picture, but not buying an iPhone means that the global economy has slightly more resources that can be put towards building a new apartment tower. So capital will still be needed. Who will provide it?
I don't think that will be strictly true that everyone will be able to consume $3000 worth of goods at today's prices, but I do think that people will be less precarious in their lives and able to not be evicted for the crime of not having enough money (which when a foreign army does similar things it's regarded as creating refugees).
It's true that the housing economy would become less dynamic. The metagame would have to shift from forcing people to vacate existing properties to the government led construction of attractive new units and some kind of planning to ensure that new areas are not starved of jobs. Kind of like China.
If there were no landlords we would have a robust public housing program. The government would build out housing then lease/sell it to the public and then they would be obligated to sell it back to the government when they finished with it - eliminating the market and preserving personal liberties to use the property.
Does your landlord stand for election? That's a huge huge difference. The landlord is only out for themselves, but the government can potentially make decisions that benefit society as a whole and are rational.
The basic problem in America today is an absolute lack of democratic control of the government and our capitalist class. I can go into this in some detail but it is a large digression from the topic at hand. But I will add, that even Donald Trump is afraid to directly cut popular programs, or at least has some limits.
Yes, every time my lease was up, I elected to stay or move. I did that multiple times for 15 years. By contrast, every time I moved, I was in the same state, so never changed governments.
There is always going to be an adversarial relationship between landlords and renters. Make no mistake: that we allow this to happen is state violence. Why? Because we are allowing individuals and corporations to deny housing to people by raising prices to make it unaffordable. We even allow them to collude [1].
The only solution to this that demonstrably works is for the state to provide a significant amount of housing to keep the private secotr honest [2].
Everything else is just propping a system that steals from the poor to give to the already rich.
What I don't get is what are you really supposed to do if you don't want to buy a house and being a landlord is illegal? I often hear people online say that being a landlord is incredibly unethical, but I have no interest in buying a house. So I don't understand how someone is wronging me by renting me one. And I'm in a lucky situation where I probably could afford to buy a house if I wanted to. Many people could not.
That said, I would obviously support the government building a large amount of high quality housing, assuming they could do it at a reasonable price.
Corporate landlords probably have more motivation to repect enforced obligations. So the ultimate corporate landlord is some level of government, and then we've arrived where I think we should be: public housing is a right.
It’s a low bar, and even lower when you know how poor the average house quality is within New Zealand.
The average European house is ludicrous hot inside compared to NZ housing.
Home efficiency matters to people who own a home, not renters. Renters only care about making rent and being able to eat. They don’t have the luxury of thinking about energy saving appliances when the landlord hasn’t fixed the appliances they do have. Renters are trapped with capped wages and increasing rents.
Plus, people generally aren't doing chores or using appliances unnecessarily. That means it's difficult to find ways to save meaningful amounts of energy other than adjusting the thermostat. Most household energy use outside heating /cooling comes from the appliances they can't upgrade, so the alternatives are quality of life issues like fewer showers and less laundry.
Surely they can ask for what the expected utilities are? Failing that, asking for what the trailing 12 month's bills were.
I had a bunch of work done after a kitchen fire in my house and it did genuinely cut my electrical bill. It also cost a lot of money and is something I wouldn't have done by choice especially in a rental property.
I purchased a home with a walk-out basement (brick exterior, cinder block foundation, >80% above grade). As it turned out, the prior owners had pulled a fast one and faked their framing with 1x4s and added no insulation. Our monthly power bills ranged from 400-500$ on a 2,000 sqft home.
I spent most of last year gutting the interior of the basement, framing, plumbing, electrical, insulation (R-13 fiberglass batt insulation), Sheetrock, paint, trim, flooring (laminate @ 2$ per sqft). I spent approximately $10k on this project doing the labor myself.
As a result, my bills are now in the 200-250 range. I had the insulation work done by 01/2025 for context. So, perhaps a new efficient water heater? But any serious work is unlikely to be worth the costs.
Insulation upgrades are heavy remodel jobs: Opening the walls requires people to leave the space for the duration of the job. Even if you can stack contractors back to back perfectly it's still a lot of time and displacement.
These things usually happen between renters when the space is vacant. In larger units you can some times shuffle renters between similar spaces but it's a huge pain and they usually don't want to do it.
It's rare to have a kitchen appliance that requires a specialized space that you have to build the kitchen around. Unless you're dealing with odd very high end appliances, a skilled installer can almost always find something from the local home store that fits into the old space.
(Source: Time spent in construction and renovation)
And the over-the-range microwave is what caused the fire in the middle of the night in the first place while I was sleeping.
Dishwashers are pretty standard as are stovetop widths although I decided to shift to a range from my prior double ovens and cooktop.
> I got cabinet above fridge taken out because fridges have basically gotten taller.
You're right that refrigerator heights aren't standardized but you must have had a really short space if nothing at all would fit.
Installations are typically supposed to leave some additional clearance for the heat to escape from behind, although some builders will try to tightly integrate them for a different look. (High end and commercial refrigerators are designed to actively exhaust and don't have the same limitations)
Any idea of the specific failure mode?
Every little repair and upgrade I've made has been more than worthwhile, and I only wish I had made more.
Though, a friend in a nicer place went and made a deal with his landlord, for landlord to pay for only materials for substantial DIY renovation friend would do. Suddenly, his apartment had higher market value...
[1] Unless landlord participates in RealPage/YieldStar, and is pushed to illegal price-fixing.
The best time to plant a tree was ten years ago. The second best time is now.
The two I really can’t do on my own that I absolutely would are replace the windows and put in solar.
It was noticeably reduced when I took the time to 3M wrap all my windows one winter, but I didn't want to do it again.
So why do anything to improve rental units? Make them slightly better than a corrugated steel shack? No thanks, that just means the landlord can market it as a "luxury condo" and charge me up the ass for it. I'll live in my steel shack thank you very much.
One of the… problems with that is that a lot of our housing stock is very old, and honestly not ever going to reach that. The grading don’t take partial improvements into account so if you do internal wall insulation on half your house it means absolutely nothing on the EPC. The means to get to C for older properties basically require insulation (not practical in pre cavity wall buildings without an ungodly amount of work) and renewable installs. That’s not to say we shouldn’t try but it’s a tall order to ask anyone to rip everything back to brick and build cavity walls in th pre 1930 stock (which there’s absolutely craploads of)
You've highlighted one of the downsides of rent control: It changes the incentive structure dramatically in ways that aren't always a win for the tenant. I had a friend in a rent controlled apartment who would quietly do things like upgrade his appliances and fix things because his rent was so low he didn't want to rock the boat for any reason at all.
My kid has been renting the same apartment while in school and their fridge failed over the summer. She manages the utilities and mentioned that their power bill halved as a result of the replacement. She said what they were paying before didn't seem outrageous so it came as a surprise to see the newer bills were consistently half of what it had been before.
This article is silly.
Imagine if car makers didn't bother with fuel efficiency because buyers had almost no choice and any car is better than nothing. We'd say that market isn't functioning well. Perhaps the problem is caused by price caps so it's not worth carmakers competing, or perhaps the law limits the number of cars that can be produced so there's always a shortage. Or perhaps it's the soviet union and there's no incentive for them to improve anything because the planners haven't demanded that they do.
Assuming the work was free (it never would be but just go with it), the upgrade would save about $100/month in electricity. To a prospective tenant, that means they'd be willing to pay up to $100 more in rent to break even. Now since we live in the real world, that upgrade now has to be paid for. The work cost $4.8k and the landlord wants to pay for it over 2 years so now there's a $200/month increase. But the work will only save $100/month. The tenant is now paying an extra $100 in total living expenses. By the time the 2 years are up, the landlord isn't going to cut the rent by $200, he'll just continue to charge the same or more than what it was 2 years ago. The tenant will forever be paying that extra $100 in living expenses while the landlord gets to pocket an extra $200.
What's needed is a baseline of acceptable housing for tenants and rent controls that force the landlord to share at least some of the financial burden.
The fact that people buy EVs and hybrids at all, despite their higher upfront cost, suggests that at least some care about fuel efficiency.
honestly both have far more acceleration than I use or want in the real world. But the fun factor is still there at lower acceleration in the ice.
Which traditional car maker actually cared about EVs before Tesla came along?
(Even Toyota, which was sorta "caring about it" did not believe in going "all in" and for a very very long time would only do Hybrid and nothing more).
Every other established car maker did not invest in this until "forced" by Tesla so to speak. And then spurred on by things like the EU regulations to no longer allow any non-EV new car registrations by ... was it 2035? Which I hear they're now thinking about undoing.
A "market" includes consumers, almost by definition, so the statement is true. Otherwise it just becomes a meaningless statement where companies can't be said to do anything.
For a slightly less contentious example, consider gaming chairs. I think most people would assume it's something "the market" came up with, considering that there wasn't some government regulation mandating gaming chairs. Consumers demanded gaming chairs, and chair companies filled the gap. A market success story, right? Nope, according to the above definition, chair companies can't do anything. They only made gaming chairs because consumers demanded them. It's actually consumers that made (?) gaming chairs!
If most landlords have newly updated units on the market for $2000/month and someone tries to rent a similar unit untouched since 1970 for $2000/month, that unrenovated unit is going to sit on the market for a very, very long time.
Just let people create value and trade.
PS: Sad that you're getting downvotes for a thoughtful, polite comment, too. Downvotes are for hiding idiocy and meanness, not viewpoints that you disagree with.
I spent 15 years living in my current state before I bought a home. In that time I moved on average every 2 years often due to changing jobs or changing living circumstances. There is no way I could have afforded to buy a home when I first moved here, and even if I could have, I didn't know anywhere near enough about the area or where I would be in 5 years let alone 10 or 20 to have made a good choice for where to buy that home. I love my home but owning this home has cost me well over 50k in repairs and maintenance in the 15 years I've owned it. That is absolutely money I would not and did not have when I first moved to this state and it would have financially ruined me to have bought and owned a home when I first moved here.
Have I had some crappy landlords? Sure. I've also had some great ones too and have very fond memories of some of the places I've lived over the years. None of which would have been possible without landlords in general.
I'd like to know which lenders allow you to do this, given a standard mortgage starts at 20% down and needs to be paid down from there. Unless you're committing mortgage fraud you can't exceed whatever initial leverage you started out with.
No, they provide capital. In modern society it's hard to picture what "capital" actually is aside from some wall st bankers in suits, but at the most basic level it's forgone consumption. Every dollar invested in a company or a house is a dollar that could have been spent on an iPhone or a nice steak, and whoever forgone that consumption needs to be compensated for it, otherwise nobody would bother doing so.
If you're trying to imply that absent landlords, every renter in Manhattan is going have $3000 (or whatever) more in their bank accounts per month and can buy so many iPhones and steaks, it quickly breaks down when you think of second order effects:
1. There are only so many apartment units in Manhattan. How do you dole them out? First come first served? How's that any different than the current situation where boomers are set for life, and young people are locked out of the housing market unless they're rich or they inherit? Everyone giving up $3000/month for a place to live in might not be ideal, but it's better than the alternative. In areas without a rental market, but where supply exceeds demand, a black market eventually develops where it basically turns into rent.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58317555
2. If there's no cost for continuing to live in an apartment, what incentive is there to vacate a unit? Manhattan is expensive to live in because that's where the jobs are, but if lived there and then retired, why bother moving? It's not costing your anything, why bother uprooting your life, or even downsizing? Note that even owners have incentive to vacate their unit, because it means they can either rent it out for $$$, or sell it to someone else. Absent that you'll have to pry them from their cold dead hands.
3. How would new housing get built? Skyscrapers are expensive, so you need some of capital to build. It might be hard to picture, but not buying an iPhone means that the global economy has slightly more resources that can be put towards building a new apartment tower. So capital will still be needed. Who will provide it?
It's true that the housing economy would become less dynamic. The metagame would have to shift from forcing people to vacate existing properties to the government led construction of attractive new units and some kind of planning to ensure that new areas are not starved of jobs. Kind of like China.
Ain't no different than leasing bajillion dollar process equipment.
The basic problem in America today is an absolute lack of democratic control of the government and our capitalist class. I can go into this in some detail but it is a large digression from the topic at hand. But I will add, that even Donald Trump is afraid to directly cut popular programs, or at least has some limits.
Yes, every time my lease was up, I elected to stay or move. I did that multiple times for 15 years. By contrast, every time I moved, I was in the same state, so never changed governments.
The only solution to this that demonstrably works is for the state to provide a significant amount of housing to keep the private secotr honest [2].
Everything else is just propping a system that steals from the poor to give to the already rich.
[1]: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY&t=7s
That said, I would obviously support the government building a large amount of high quality housing, assuming they could do it at a reasonable price.