I fully get the issues with landlords in terms of coasting off of other people's labor and in general being parasitic. My question is, the resistance I get when I say that someone shouldn't profit off of another person's need for housing is that they bring up grocery stores/ restaurants profiting off of a person's need for food. And I don't really know how to address or answer that. Just wondering if someone can close the loop for me!
I don't think I've ever had a liberal actually push back on that, they just kinda scoff.
Here are some talking points that might help:
Food is also something that should be guaranteed and then decommodified.
Landlords extract wealth from tenants, increasing the cost of housing overall. We could simply build that housing publicly and cut out the exploitative middleman.
Landlords and slumlords are barely distinguishable in the vast majority of cases. Because their goal is to maximize profit for themselves, land + housing has natural monopolistic tendencies, and their tenants are in a weaker position than them, they don't have to actually hold up their end of the bargain. They let problems go until you move out and they want to raise rent. They keep your deposit even though you did everything expected. They raise your rent just because they can. This is not an efficient or effective means of providing housing.
This is passive income through direct exploitation, which creates a class divide. Landlords are rarely on your side, they fight against the interests of the public. They gentrify, they fight against homeless shelters in their neighborhood, they rely on the cops for their evictions. We should remove/combat all such divides.
Economically speaking, they are pure leeches. They contribute nothing, it would be far better to take their money and build public housing. They should be working jobs like the rest of us if they can and stand in solidarity.