This is one of the reasons I became a landlord in the first place. One of my tenants recently experienced a terrible water damage issue that caused both bathrooms in their unit to be unavailable while repairs occur. They were shocked when I told them I would cover the cost of their relocation expenses while the repairs occurred.
I got really lucky when the company I work for went public. Going from being nearly homeless as a child to being a well-compensated, and now wealthy, engineer really was motivating to give something back. Buying a few properties, renting them to lower income people, and really working with them when they're struggling might not be efficient/scalable with my little 7 figure windfall, but being able to make and see a direct impact really makes me quite happy.
That's not uniformly true, and often only applies if it's due to citation after an inspection. Regardless, the tenants are often not aware of these regulations. Besides, my point was mainly that the tenants I have are so used to landlords taking advantage of them that they are shocked when one shows basic human decency to them.
I could barely believe this story when a pretty big youtuber had his upstairs neighbor flood his entire apartment, mold started growing everywhere and all his landlord offered was signing a new long-term lease on a different unit he didn't want.
He ended up somewhat deliberately staying after he got it out of them that they couldn't legally kick him out quickly, and he was trying to finish the purchase of a house at the time. But it seemed nuts that the landlord wouldn't be on the hook to provide him housing through the term of his lease without signing a new contract, or pay some large amount to break the contract that could have helped him cover a temporary mold-free option.
In many jurisdictions there are habitability requirements that, if not met, make it unlawful for the landlord to collect rent for the period during which they are not remedied, but there I am not aware of any that requires the landlord to supply substitute lodging (the presumption generally being that the withheld rent can instead be used for that purpose, though that’s dubious, in general.)
It’s a simple breach of contract. A rental agreement basically states that the tenant will pay rent and the landlord will provide a habitable apartment. The most common breach occurs when the tenant doesn’t pay their rent. However, when the apartment isn’t habitable, it’s the landlord who is in breach. The damages in such a case are the cost of substitue comparable accommodations, even if that cost is higher than the rental amount. So the landlord may not have to provide substitute accommodations, but he would be liable for damages if he didn’t.
Edit: I may be biased by living in California where there is apparently an implied warranty of habitability.
Petty landlords are the vast majority, unfortunately. All they care about is extracting rent. They don't see tenants as human beings who can struggle, but rather as a source of income to exploit and ignore as much as they can.
Tenants don't have to be thinking about any of those things to maliciously destroy a property. None of them come into play when you have, for example, a tenant who hasn't paid rent in months, or who runs illegal businesses out of the property, etc.
yeah i lived in one that got in trouble (after i had moved out) for not telling their tenants about the lead paint or asbestos. they also had the elevator out of order for nearly two years during which period they raised the rent three times. have fun moving out of a fifth floor apartment when you have to carry furniture down the narrow stairs with four right angle turns every floor.
yes quiet. It sucked, especially because we had a baby at the time and trying to carry groceries and a child up those stairs to a unairconditioned apartment mid summer was not something deserving of a laugh track.
It’s a similar deal in the UK, where not to long ago parliament voted down an attempt to require rented accommodation be fit for human habitation. Apparently that’s too high a demand from landlords.
As an example of this kind of rule from a place that currently has them, the basic coverage of California’s implied warranty of habitability are covered on pp 48-50 of this document:
Being legally required to do something as a landlord, seldom translates into something convenient or even in one's favor, as a renter. Most landlords I've ever had use "legally required to do so" as a way to do the bare minimum and let you initiate contact with a lawyer or court, thus dragging out whatever it is you think they're legally required to do.
I think it depends on the state as well as contractual agreements. It's amazing how many rights you can legally sign away or minimize via contract law, largely to the benefit of those writing the contracts and not those signing contracts.
Simply relabeling or reclassifying the use of something and having agreement to those uses to pass liability of "misuse" when both parties are aware of actual and intended use goes a long way as well.
So many ways to pass liabilities and rights. The more society evolves, the less business is about providing or creating any sort of new value and more about optimizing away risk, costs, and any other potential liabilities while capturing as much actual value from the deal as possible in the process.
In theory, competition "regulates" this away. Some other landlord who provides a better value or service will clearly succeed over less value-add services to the consumer. In practice, the amount of choice, finite limitations of the best service providers, and often sheer complexity anymore of determining which amongst a set of options is actually best to the consumer seems to make this a non-starter. It allows a lot of abuse on the provider side to provide little-to-nothing and a continuous supply of new consumers to abuse should previous consumers become wiser and move on.
> Going from being nearly homeless as a child to being a well-compensated, and now wealthy, engineer really was motivating to give something back. Buying a few properties, renting them to lower income people
Isn't Adam Smith referring to feudal lords who fed/clothed their subjects and led them into war with their neighboring lords? That's not at all similar to landlords today.
You mean the one where he says that landlords (in the feudal sense, to be fair) are the only class in society which features the combination of the wits to recognize their own interests and interests aligned with the general interests of society, unlike both the mercantile (what we might now call capitalist) class, who knew their interests but whose interests were at odds with the broader society, and the laboring classes whose interests were the general interests, but who were too dull to know them and too easily misled by others?
Unless I’m mistaken, that refers to farmland and not developed housing. The opening words describe harvesting keep, fish, and animal husbandry. It seems to be decrying the fact that rent can be charged for a field of wheat, where nature did the work.
If there’s housing on that property, then that is something that was developed by the (current or previous) landlord for direct use by the tenant.
However, I’m unfamiliar with this work, so if a different conclusion is drawn elsewhere it would be interesting to read.
don't overlook the first line by smith which i originally intended to highlight: "Landlords' right has its origin in robbery."
in effect, from smith's early draft of "the wealth of nations" (~1763): "In a Civilized Society the poor provide both for themselves and for the enormous luxury of their Superiors. [...] [T]hose who labour most get least."
which calls for that staggering question by spinoza: "Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?" deleuze & guattari following: "the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike"
In metro areas of most concern, the cost of the house is almost always a pittance relative to the cost of the land the house sits on. The value of that land rarely having been accrued as the result of the landlord's actions.
Mine has a severe gas leak. Left me and kids with brain damage that took years just for us to get back to somewhat normal baseline again. Got nothing. Lawyers said too hard to prove that massive amounts of gas filling the house caused problems. Took years to just get our security deposit back.
Screw Invitation Homes
> As a landlord, I require my tenants to have renter's insurance.
A landlord requiring renters insurance is illegal in the state of Oklahoma. It may be illegal in certain cities or towns as well. That said these are exceptions; this is broadly legal in the United States.
Assuming you live in the US, presumably you have ensured this practice is legal where you live.
If you’re making profit from the fact that someone has not enough money or a good enough credit score to buy their own place, whilst you may be the nicest landlord in the world you’re still technically exploiting the situation for your own gain.
I’m not saying you’re a bad person or a parasite, our landlady is lovely, but you have to be frank about the fact that someone else is working to enrich you to some level.
I always find statements like this to be a strange rhetorical tactic of debate.
They presuppose that a personally held view, and oftentimes fringe one, is universally true and accepted and then make a bold unsupported criticism.
The charitable take is that people making them don't know that their view is controversial and think it is shared fact.
The less charitable take is that they are intentionally misleading, and doing it as a debate tactic to claim ground while avoiding discussing the real disagreement.
All throughout history, it is usually another society who comes in and takes an already occupied land by force and then charges a fee for the previous people to continue using it. Then there are complex laws set up to make it impossible for these previous people's to own their land again, becoming indebted in one way or another. After a while, after this land has been transferred, typically amongst the families of those who first took the land (or their friends), some people forget this history or are ignorant of it, and just go along with what has been done for years. Inevitably, those with the excess monetary value gained from rent is used to expand and establish these kinds of societal institutions so that it is part of the zeitgeist and thus a controversial take to think this kind of institution is an immoral, or bad, or exploitative one.
I believe you can Google "landlord history" and you'll get a plenty of results with some brief history of the term.
If you want to read further, look at history on colonization or apartheid which sets up these types of infrastructures or variations of it. History w/ Native Americans and what is going on in Israel are two recent/ongoing examples.
As for pre-capitalist history, you can look up "feudal land tenure", and before that is just different concepts of modes of land ownership across different geographies.
Are you saying that Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, and Karl Marx, the father of socialism and communism, both think like the above person, but they are the ones misleading?
Being a landlord is an economic and political matter. To pretend the status quo of current hierarchies is fine to go with because it is the status quo belief is an awful way to live. Imagine if any radicals you admire in history behaved this way.
Both Smith and Marx state their priors, and neither assume that their option is commonly held. Both make thoughtful and well articulated arguments.
this is like if Marx's Manifesto was one page saying "everyone knows landords are bad"
On the topic of radicals, there are a lot that I don't admire and were atrocious. being against the status quo is not inherently virtuous. Imagine if X mass murderer just respected the status quo.
you can be for challenging hierarchies, the status quo, and a more dynamic socio-economic structure without making yourself slave to your neighbor. For that matter, you can do it without trying to enslave your neighbor
I know this is an old comment (for HN) but I will check back in 24 hours), or we can take it offsite. I always like a good chat. "S1artibarfastHN" at Gmail
I have informed opinions on property ownership and housing. I was a director for 100-person housing Co-op. I have been a renter. I am currently a landlord squeezing one tenant for market rate and providing another tenant housing and perpetuity for utility costs.
- I’m unhoused and identify as a lumpenprole.
- Everything is a spectrum imo.
- I was referring to radicals that aren’t radlib or fascist leaning.
I’d be interested in the email I send you and a response on which orthodox left-wing radicals were atrocious. Or if we agree that those specific radicals were not atrocious but many others are.
Awesome being director of a coop! Though IME most housing coops are exclusionary and not remotely democratic*
*I mean real democracy, not what neoliberal countries have.
You're implying that owning a property is unconditionally more favourable than renting. That's not neccessarily true though.
My wife and I recently decided to buy after renting voluntarily for decades. We did all sorts of calculations. In some scenarios renting comes out on top. In others buying is more favourable.
Ultimately, our decision was based on the uncertainty created by the referencing system, on the recent spell of inflation and on changed personal circumstances rather than any long term financial advantage.
I don't like the sort of relationship that exists between landlords and tenants in the UK, but I'm not convinced that it is necessarily one of financial exploitation.
Small landlords have their money tied up in a badly diversified, inflexible asset that comes with unpredictable maintanance costs. I would never invest my own money like this.
If all goes well for the landlord, they make a profit. If not, only the bank makes a profit (unless interest rates rise too quickly and they have issued too many fixed rate mortgages).
If you buy your own home, the bank makes a profit and if you're lucky it turns out well for you financially. There's no guarantee that it will.
This isn't any different than running a business, except that landlords generally feel entitled to make a profit from their investment, no matter the economic situation, and laws generally favor that. Backing that is the army of folks like you who tend to side with the "small landlord", which normally leaves out that the vast majority of small landlords are quite wealthy, and tend to own multiple properties.
Yes, there are a small number of cases of a small landlord, with one property that they're having a hard time breaking even on, but those folks have a bad investment, and if they can't afford their investment, they should sell it to try to minimize their losses. Renters aren't on the hook to make them profitable.
By holding rental properties, they're inflating the value of homes for sale, making it harder for people to buy, and forcing people into renting.
We don't pity people who make stupid business decisions, so why should we pity landlords?
I never said we should pity them (I certainly don't) or that they are entitled to a profit. You're exactly right that they are running a business. They are running a business that comes with costs and risks. It can go right or wrong like any business. That's fine.
What I'm disputing is that it is necessarily exploitation and that owning your home is always the preferable choice.
I do understand where your sentiment comes from. The name "landlord" basically says it all. It hasn't always been a normal business and there is still quite a lot of that history left in the relationship between landlords and tenants (as well as in the grotesque distribution of land ownership in the UK).
About inflating the value of homes for sale I'm not sure. On one hand the available land is limited and so demand should inflate prices. I'm not even sure private ownership (or at least inheritance) of land should exist at all.
On the other hand, the price of homes as well as the level of rents is mostly determined by how many homes are built. More (private and public) capital flowing into building new homes makes home ownership and rents more affordable. Buy-to-let landlords provide some of that capital.
The other thing that could be done is changing planning rules and the taxation of land ownership so that more affordable homes get built.
I don't think home ownership deserves the status it has. Renting is fine. Affordability is far more important than who owns the place.
If you're taking a generalised anticapitalist view then I understand your position. But under the assumption that private capital exists, it is hard to argue that none of it should be used to increase the supply of homes. That doesn't preclude other sources of funding.
Also, it shouldn't be impossible to debate systemic issues without comparing people to pests.
I actually think your opinion is the damaging one. Do you honestly think a world without being able to rent because we've eliminated landlords is a good one?
There are many scenarios where people would far rather rent than buy. E.g. you are trying to get to know a city to decide where to buy a house. You want to work in a city for a few years. You've just moved to a country and don't want to buy a property until you get a feel for where in the country you want to live, or maybe until you get permanent residence sorted out.
And that's not even covering cases where people don't have the money to buy yet. And no, it's not realistic to expect that people will all always have money to buy. Maybe they are young and just entered the workforce. Maybe they are an immigrant looking for a better life and came with little cash.
There has to be a rental market and thus there have to be landlords. Being a landlord does not make one "evil" or even taking advantage of people. It's needed and frankly shitty job. I'd personally never want to do it.
I'm being frank, your attitude is pretty toxic does not help the people who need the help the most.
You're proposing a false dichotomy where the only two options are private landlords and no rental properties whatsoever. There are so many alternate systems of providing housing to people, including social housing, non-profit rental housing, housing cooperatives, building cooperatives, cohousing, intentional communities, community land trusts, communes, land value taxes, etc.
Also, being a landlord isn't a job. Owning property isn't a job. Property management can be a job, but the typical landlord is barely lifting a finger to do much of that.
> You're proposing a false dichotomy where the only two options are private landlords and no rental properties whatsoever. There are so many alternate systems of providing housing to people, including social housing, non-profit rental housing, housing cooperatives, building cooperatives, cohousing, intentional communities, community land trusts, communes, land value taxes, etc.
How are most of those things alternatives to housing ownership?
There's really only three possibilities. The occupant owns the place, or some other private party (individual or corporation) owns the place, or the government owns the place (public housing in its many variants).
Everything you list is one of these three (except for LVT which is an unrelated thing).
I worked as a property manager for years (of around 200 units, across numerous owners) and can vouch for the fact that the vast majority of landlords do absolutely nothing except for receive a monthly statement, and complain if the profits aren't high enough.
They made an investment and want you to maximize the returns. A very, very small percentage are active in their management, and those folks tend to be the worst form of slumlords, because they're so cheap they won't hire people to professionally manage the properties.
> I’m not saying you’re a bad person or a parasite, our landlady is lovely, but you have to be frank about the fact that someone else is working to enrich you to some level.
You can make this argument about literally any purchased good. Everything bought by a worker is the same thing.
Capitalism = exploitation? That seems like the point they are trying to make. And it’s mostly not wrong, although we haven’t found a better way. Perhaps more accurately, human behavior = economic behavior = exploitation, regardless of the economic system.
Expanding it out, I doubt it’s specific to humans, more like a property of known life forms.
You also have to believe that a willing Exchange that benefits both parties is exploitation.
It also doesn't help that exploitation is so poorly defined in these discussions that it could simply be substituted by "bad" or "something I don't like".
The financial asymmetry of having certain baseline costs to sustain our biomechanical meat bags despite wildly divergent means can easily lead to transactions that are mutually beneficial, while still reenforcing the leverage of those who already have plenty.
I’d be interested in your response to the person who replied to you. It’s a compelling argument against exploitation being vague. Which isn’t even true unless you mean conversations between liberals and conservatives.
It is a interesting and workable definition for further discussion once it is provided. In my experience you ask 10 people what exploitation means and you get 10 different answers- everyone has their own.
That said, I like it and would be interested in exploring it more. Exploitations is a transaction that increases leverage for future transactions is one that I havent heard before.
Im also curious about the inverse.e.g. what transactions reduce leverage?
There are many reasons why a landlord will either not get rich or get rich at a much slower pace than alternatives. Just to mention a few:
1. Buying in a bad neighborhood and things just get worse.
2. Tenant falling far behind for some reason then moving out.
3. Overpaying or over capitalizing.
4. While looking for a buyer or tenant, squatters or looters move in.
Please don't use terms like 'exploit' without specific details.
I prefer to be a tenant so that I have less worries, more freedom and more capital available for other investments.
> Buying in a bad neighborhood and things just get worse.
I can tell you've never done property management, because the most profitable areas are bad neighborhoods. In the US, section 8 housing is effectively guaranteed income, at favorable rates. The tenants don't really have much say in the conditions of the apartment, and all that's needed is to pass the housing authority inspection (which only cares about safety, not quality), so costs are generally low.
Being a slumlord is extremely profitable.
> Tenant falling far behind for some reason then moving out.
For the vast majority of the US, you can evict a person for nearly any reason with 30 days notice, and can evict someone for non-payment with 5 days notice. Holidays can extend that by a few days here and there, but for the most part, you can avoid tenants being months behind in rent, especially if the market is saturated.
Some landlords like to let their tenants fall behind because as long as the tenants eventually pay the rent, they get the late fees, which can increase their rents by 20% or so. Preying on the poor is also very profitable.
> Overpaying or over capitalizing.
You can do the same with any investment. Unlike other investments, though, you can write off most of your expenses, and you can carryover loss for essentially forever. Even bad real estate investments can be beneficial. There's a reason real estate investment is heavily favored by the rich.
Landlords aren't guaranteed to get rich, but it's extremely difficult to actually lose money as a landlord, unless you're a really shitty investor. Nearly everything you spend money on can be used for tax deductions (sometimes for years or forever after the loss), so even losses tend to be beneficial, when you're diversified properly. The law is way too favorable to property investment.
> While looking for a buyer or tenant, squatters or looters move in.
I did property management for a long time and can tell you this simply isn't a real problem. Squatters rights take a long time, and the police will forcibly remove them.
Doesn't one also have to admit that everyone has to be somewhere and for most people it costs money. What does it matter where one's housing money goes? The only concern is that one is satisfied with the housing they are paying for.
I don't get this take at all. Yes, I own my house, but it comes with a significant number of trade-offs: My employment is limited to what the immediate neighborhood can offer[0], I'm on the hook for major repairs[1], and moving is an expensive proposition. When I rent, the premium over what I'd pay for a mortgage is priced into that convenience.
[0] Things were better during the 100% remote environment of the pandemic, but many employers are now doing RTO
[1] In the recent past, I've had to replace my AC and my roof. The AC repair bill was equivalent to 6 months of mortgage payments and the roof was equivalent to a year's worth of mortgage payments.
Well, we need to have better system for temporary housing first. Not everyone renting is poor or can't afford buying one either and you can't really expect people to go against their own interest.
It would be nice if most of the renting was city-built and ran, with maybe buyout option if you live there for more than 5-10 or so years. THen city could easily control development, earn a bit of profit, and control the costs
We need a better solution for housing in general. I don't actually want to be a landlord very much. I have a 7-figure portfolio including two rental properties, and I still rent. I'm not sure I could ever convince myself to buy in the bay area until/unless I had a substantially larger portfolio ($20M+). The numbers just don't add up.
So? Sell it to some shitty landlord? What’s the best option here?
Even if you sell low to low income people, they may be forced to sell at some point, to the highest bidder. I think OP is doing something really great: provide affordable housing on good terms.
It's possible to attack this problem from multiple angles. As it stands right now the tenants that occupy my properties either don't want to own (grad students) or can't afford it (e.g., service workers, low-end "white collar" job holders in the bay area). By charging (significantly) lower than market rent, deferring or waiving rent, setting up very long term payment plans, and basically treating them like they're people with lives that shit happens to them in I do what I can as an individual. By working in other areas (e.g. with NGOs) I do what I can to contribute as an individual to a larger group effort to change the way housing works in this area.
Given that one person can't make the rental market go away, no matter how much they might want to, mitigating it is perfectly reasonable. I'd go further and suggest forming a Humane Landlord's Association with explicitly stated humane values.
The poor person it better served by someone who rents fairly at or below market rate, than it is by social housing that can take years to get into.
Making money while also doing the right thing is the best thing at all, everyone feels good about it, and its a relationship built off mutual respect.
Like, I want to encourage landlords to do this, and I want to move property holdings away from the consolidation we've seen towards private equity and massive REIT's holding rental housing - locally owned rentals, where the owner has a stake in the communities these homes are in, is the best practical case of all.
Do you really believe that homeownership is for everyone? It’s not. Hell, it is not for some of my friends in tech. You’ve got a lot to maintain, a lot of work to do, a lot to keep track of. That either means money, or pretty broad DIY skills. That’s not for everyone. It’s definitely not (at least right away) for someone who has perhaps not had the opportunity to experience homeownership via their parents.
If earlier poster is indeed renting at comfortable rates and taking better-than-average care of the properties and the residents, s/he truly is doing some good in the world.
Entering into and then holding up your end of fair bargains with other people is a good thing to do. We need that a lot more than we need altruistic gestures, in my opinion.
As throughly demonstrated in this thread - unless you go to extreme effort like threatening to take someone to court - Landlords hold all the power to set rates, increase rates, ignore complaints etc and there are almost no avenues for recompense.
So no, there can be no fair exchange when lambs negotiate with wolves.
What happens if you have a landlord who follows (or exceeds) the law?
I've rented from plenty like this, simply because I took the effort to find places that were locally owned (while not a cure all, it helps).
Also, whats the alternative? not everyone can meet the financial or responsibility requirements that come with homeownership. So what are you left with after that, government owned housing?
Your point is bullshit. Anyone who can rent can afford to own. I’ve owned half a dozen properties at this point and it’s clear that Banks just do as much fuckery as possible to make lending impossible to anyone that doesn’t perfectly fit their mold.
How about a system that doesn’t primarily benefit property owners?
I dont think thats correct, as a recent homeowner.
The deposit requirements are high to get a loan, now yes, we could change that thru subsidy or guaranty by the government.
But what about maintenance? renting is turn-key, even when your mortgage is lower than rent, you still have the unexpected costs that appear?
In the six months I've been here, I've had to replace or repair:
Garburator
Cooktop
Oven Coils
Shower Controls
Sink Faucets
A couple circuit breakers
Sprinklers (all of them, 80% of them were broken)
Also, yard maintenance is this ongoing battle, between tree droppings, grass mowing, and weed abatement (some of which you must do, like dealing with noxious vines).
If you wanna fix a greater social ill, the issue isn't 'benefitting owners' its that people have been conditioned to treat their home like an investment rather than a place to live and prosper in. Property Values shouldn't be going up 5x faster than inflation, but they have been for a couple decades.
You realize all those costs are baked into the rent right? Even with cost distribution among multiple properties or multi-family complex, the per-service fees often exceed what you would pay a tradesman and the lack of flexiblity drives certain costs up in renting situations like limitations on modifications.
In my experience (Owned 3 homes, rented 4 homes) it’s net-net between renting and owning across multiple factors including overall cost, and think I’m near the mean when it comes to handiwork - so it’s not like I’m doing all my electrical and HVAC myself and I’m in an expensive area.
Yes, all of the costs are just baked into rent. They're not baked into a Mortgage, and people dont get that so they end up buying as much house as their rent was, and then get over their skis when they suddenly need to cough up 15k for a new roof?
If you're in the position where even paying the rent consistently is a marginally difficult problem, even if lending standards are relaxed sufficiently, how is this person going to pay for a new roof unless the price of that loan is subsidized to the point that it either has a zero or negative interest rate?
Not everyone can buy - either because of the work required, or because of the financial outlays needed. Also to be honest, not everyone wants that responsibility.
In the states not having a garbage disposal is a relative rarity, but I'll give you that. Sprinklers are a regional thing.
We also had to replace:
Drywall due to mold issues
Leaking Laundry Valves (see above)
A leaking hose bib which necessitated sweating on new fittings
New fittings on the hot water heater (to add a shutoff)
Various other electrical work (replace outlets, retorque loose neutral, brought grounding most of the way up to modern code - house had no buried ground rod)
To make my point further - I've had many of these issues at an apartment, in my time living in apartments I've had the following work done in or around my unit:
Replacement of in wall heater
Replacement of Garburator
Replacement of Hot Water Heater
Replacement of Shower Vales
Replacement of AC Condenser
Replacement of Dishwasher
Replacement of Hot Water Heater (and remediation of the water damage from it)
Replacement of Water Faucets
Replacement of Load Center (Fuse Box)
Repair of Refrigerator and Stove
Installation of new landscaping (new sod, bushes, etc)
Repair/Replacement of Sprinklers
Repaving of parking area
Replacement of Roof
Painting
Replacement of Siding
Cleaning of HVAC Ducting
The total cost to me on all of these issues was zero dollars - and thats my point. Those multitude of repairs are not free when you own your home, and can often be quite costly.
Spoken like somebody who has clearly never owned property, rented homes, or built anything, or risked money to build a business. You are so, so far off here. Landlords only hold "all the power" if we constrict housing. That is a policy problem, not "evil landlords". Read up!
You're mostly right though, so long as housing is consistently treated as an investment rather than a commodity produced and sold in bulk, landlords hold all of the power.
People who criticize the commodification of housing I think tend to believe the correct and valid definition is:
(2) something useful or valued.
or
(5) one that is subject to ready exchange or exploitation within a market. (emphasis added)
I tend to focus on:
(1c) a mass-produced unspecialized product.
or
(4) a good or service whose wide availability typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (such as brand name) other than price.
Housing was commodified after WWII, when we stamped out so much housing, it was cheap and available to everyone. When housing is that available, it removes much of the power of landlords to distort the market.
I got really lucky when the company I work for went public. Going from being nearly homeless as a child to being a well-compensated, and now wealthy, engineer really was motivating to give something back. Buying a few properties, renting them to lower income people, and really working with them when they're struggling might not be efficient/scalable with my little 7 figure windfall, but being able to make and see a direct impact really makes me quite happy.